On The Media: Sex and Technology

I love the NPR weekend program "On the Media," and this week they dedicate much of the show to the ever-popular topic, Sex and the Media (what, is it sweeps week in public radio?). It includes segments on the 50-year anniversary of Playboy (interviews with Hugh Hefner and Gay Talese), political controversy over France's long tradition of broadcasting softcore porn and an interview with lead anchor at NakedNews.com.

The most interesting piece, however, for this audience, is the segment titled "Sex and Technology," charting the power of the porn industry to pioneer new advances in media from etchings, the printing press and photography through to video tape (advancing an explanation that VHS won in the market over the superior BETA video format in large part because pornographers preferred the cheaper VHS format) and, of course, the Internet. Full of interviews with pioneers of web porno and the new vanguard of wireless porn and digital touch technology (a dirty limerick comes to mind).

NOTE: As of this writing, Sunday afternoon, the transcripts and audio files of this program are not yet online, but they should be at the link above by Monday.

Well I'm not sure how I missed it but the 1.0 of phpOpenTracker just shipped a few days ago.  This is a comprehensive web site traffic analysis solution built in php:

phpOpenTracker is a framework solution for the analysis of website traffic and visitor analysis.

It features a logging engine that, either invoked as a web-bug by a HTML <img> tag or embedded with two lines of code into your PHP application, logs each request to a website into a database. One installation of phpOpenTracker can track an arbitrary number of web-sites. [ Go ]

Amazon EBooks and Self Publishing

Hmm... Interesting.  Matt has the damn good idea that perhaps an alternative to the "Computer Book Writers Hell" is self publishing on Amazon.  Good thinking Matt, thanks!  I see that LockerGnome is doing it.  Anyone know how to be a publisher to Amazon's eBook division?  [ Go ]

Slogan writing is something that everyone should be able to do, but few actually can.

This is a great list of advertising slogans, including the Coca-Cola's from 1885 to 2000.

My favourite:

Camel Cigarettes - "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."

Further resources: