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sex trade
sex trade
sex trade
VC caught up in largest online-escort sting
Arizona police busted Night Entertainment Partners, a $3 million-a-year conglomerate of escort agencies, earlier this month. Caught in the sweep: William Ferretti, a venture capitalist who now faces felony charges. Night was far larger than Emperor's Club VIP, the agency most infamous for its former Client 9, Eliot Spitzer. Its business spanned three states and the bust has resulted in 55 indictments and 33 arrests, including Ferretti, whom prosecutors seem to be charging with funding the operation. Where did he first come into contact with the business? His attorney says it was at an Apple Store in Arizona, which happened to be in the same building as the escort services' corporate offices. More »
Kill Your Blog
Oversharing is over -- save it for your book deal
Former blog queen Emily Gould suggests the rest of us delete, unfollow, cancel, and block ourselves from the Web. This is notable chiefly because Gould's last big appearance in print was an excessively detailed confessional of her online misadventures for the New York Times Magazine. The social media age is complicated, she complains in a writeup of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody for MIT's Tech Review. Someone stop us before we blog again! More »
Geek Love
No, she won't go "Facebook Official" with you
"Dating isn't dead, it's just changed names!" So the newspapers reassure us. Don't blame today's "hookup culture" on Web-driven moral decay or the rapid-thumbed narcissism of the Youngs. The Internet has actually saved romance. "They may not call it 'dating,' but they still 'go out,'" a Contra Costa Times reporter explains. "And when it gets serious enough, they announce it online and become 'Facebook official.'" Facebook has saved dating? Fine, one fewer thing to blame Sheryl Sandberg for. But it's still not true. More »
12:40 PM on Tue Aug 19 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
1,827 views,
4 comments
Latest by raincoaster: It's really quite poignant when you sign on and see "Bobo has switched status from 'in a relationship' to 'single'". more »
twitter
Hot startup to squirm away from old man's caring embrace
It's been a rough year so far, Internet, what with Twitter's ups and downs, Facebook's family feud, and Microsoft's failed bear-hug acquisition of Yahoo. Now a bunch of grumpy old men are plotting a "bear hug" on Twitter, too. Not a takeover, per se, and more passive-aggressive than hostile. But make no mistake: Steve Gillmor and his gang want to bend the microblogging platform to their will, with their ursine embrace, at Bear Hug Camp, a group grope set for September. More »
sex trade
Manhunt chairman told to stop backing McCain
Cruising for no-strings-attached relations with power players? That's what Manhunt's gay users thought they were getting from each other, not from Manhunt founder Jonathan Crutchley. Crutchley made a $2,300 donation to the hetero-lovin' McCain campaign, which sparked a minor mutiny on the sex site that made him rich, leading to his resignation as chairman. At least he got his money back from McCain, who wanted to do nothing from gay-hookup bucks. Honestly: We thought sugar daddies were always the very height of discretion. (Photo via Out.com)
SavvyAuntie
Getting rich as a mommyblogger without the messy mommy part
Add mommyblogging to the long list of maternal entitlements. It's the old story of exploiting your childbearing for commercial gain, this time online! Ah, but even ladybloggers without kids can get a piece of the mommyblogger ad budget. According to the Washington Post, Melanie Notkin's SavvyAuntie.com had advertisers and "a well-known venture capitalist" after her from day one, interested in cashing in with her on on the "parenting site for nonparents." We're reminded of PlanetOut's fundraising days, when venture capitalists told the gay and lesbian site's founders that they should refocus the site to appeal to gays and their hip straight friends. Notkin has a point, though: If you're going to buy your best girlfriend's brood a Barack Obama onesie, shouldn't you be allowed to blog about it, add affiliate e-commerce links, and run ads on the page, too? More »
Location-Based Disservices
How to lie to your friends with Web 2.0
"We think it's a good thing that users can lie," said Tom Coates, of Fire Eagle, the location-tagging app Yahoo just opened up to all comers-and-goers. It's a topical spin on a problem as old as Dodgeball, the first widely adopted friend-finding cell-phone app. Dodgeball and its kin are ostensibly used for telling your friends where you are. But really? They're even better for avoiding people. Using a "mobile phone to play hide-and-seek is a welcome development for social-mapping services," claims Newsweek.com, based on a few users' own predictably poor personal habits of relying on technology to do their dirty work for them. More »
2:40 PM on Fri Aug 15 2008
By Melissa Gira Grant
1,012 views,
7 comments
Latest by BarneyRubble: Shadowlayer's correct. Either you're doing something incredibly mundane ("I'm buying anti-dandruff shampoo at Walgreens") or something cool but the fact that more »
Cute Startup Alert
Tumblr -- our very first Cute Startup Alert!
[Editor's note: You probably didn't read Sassy magazine's Cute Band Alert back in the '90s. But that girl in your campus lab, the one who made her own zines and wore slips as outerwear? She did. In homage, we give you Cute Startup Alert!] Tumblr is at the apex of blog cute right now. We blame founder David Karp and his short pants. There's something indierock about the way Karp avoided Silicon Valley to found his company in Manhattan and stock it with Williamsburg residents. More »
Team Party Crash
Meet Leah Culver and her circle of ex-boyfriends
Programming Django isn't quite the same as dropping Dorothy Parker quips at lushed-out parties, but Pownce cofounder Leah Culver's line last night warmed even my cynical heart. Scene: We were mobbed briefly around the photo booth at 330 Ritch, former gay bathhouse and setting for the public launch of Yahoo's location-based mobile social thing, Fire Eagle. "Melissa, I want you to meet Cal Henderson," she said, presenting Flickr's head of engineering. "He's a fan ..." More »
blogging for dollars
Advertisers want ladyblog dollars, not opinions
Mommyblog superstar Heather "Dooce" Armstrong can use "a lewd word" on her masthead and hold onto her J.C. Penney sponsorship. Why can't the rest of the ladybloggers cash in while cussing? Venture capitalist Tim Draper puts it best: “I love women. Women are more than half the population, and they do most of the shopping." Your womanblog is only worth something if you type one-handed, a shopping bag clutched in the other. More »
Warren Nanney
Facebook sex cruiser's 450 underage friends could land him in jail
Most teenage girls on Facebook and MySpace would ignore messages from a guy calling himself "jadedwasted." That's the nom de Web of Warren Nanney, a guy whom Idaho cops are investigating for allegedly approaching young women for sex on social networks. On Facebook alone, Nanney had "over 500 contacts, 500 people listed as friends and 90 percent of them were under the age of 18," according to local police. Nanney was also allegedly cruising MyYearbook.com, a site the investigators say they'd never heard of before. (It's one of Barry Diller's favorites.) More »
Shutterfly
Shutterfly lets its users photos out, almost
Shutterfly, the photo-sharing website for those who want to share their vacation photos on a T-shirt, is launching a feature today called Share Sites. Now users can display their photos in a gallery that looks like the rest of the Web. But they still cannot do what rivals have allowed for some time — to actually get their photos on a MySpace profile. Why not? More »
Olympics
China deports Twitter user for livestreaming Olympics protest
Activist Twitterer noneck (aka Noel Hidalgo) was in Tiananmen Square on Saturday for a free-Tibet protest. After he Twittered the event and broadcast it live over Qik, Chinese authorities deported him. He's one of 28 activists bounced from China during the Olympics, but the only one who documented his actions live, with over 30,000 views. Rather foolish of the Chinese government: Had they not deported Hidalgo, it's unlikely so many people would have paid attention to his lifecast. His video of the pro-Tibet die-in runs below: More »
Politics
Internet safe from California porn tax
Online porn has been spared an XXXL tax, proposed last spring by Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D.-some town where no one buys porn). When even state Republicans wouldn't back the 25 percent tax on adult entertainment, including streaming and downloaded Internet content, Calderon's argument that those who produce and consume porn need to pay for its "harms" on the community started to fell apart. This week, the bill got tied up in the Appropriations Committee, from whence it's believed to be unlikely to emerge before the close of the legislative session on November 30. The term is "held under submission," and it has nothing to do with anything going on inside Kink.com's headquarters in the Mission District.
Fred Baron
Rocketboom-Rielle Hunter links exposed
What do Rocketboom's Andrew Baron and John Edwards's fling Rielle Hunter have in common? They're both videobloggers who live off of trial lawyer Fred Baron's largesse. Financing from Fred, Andrew's dad, got Andrew's Rocketboom videoblog off the ground. Add to that his contributions to the Edwards campaign, including paying to move Hunter to a new home in Santa Barbara, away from the limelight. And most damningly, Baron Sr. may have arranged for Baron Jr. to do video work for the Edwards campaign — simultaneously boosting his favored candidate and his son's business. More »
blogging for dollars
Rielle Hunter caught on Robert Scoble's camera
Robert Scoble did in fact capture some footage of John Edwards's mistress, Rielle Hunter, back in 2006 when flying with the campaign's blogger party plane. The problem: All of the tapes are property of PodTech, the videoblogger's former employer, so all he can release are the still images, like this one of Hunter seated with Edwards. More »
Social Networks
4 ways Facebook helped Sarah Lacy's career
Sarah Lacy, the BusinessWeek.com columnist whose pearl necklaces and resistance to insults I've always admired, explains to U.S. News & World Report how to use Facebook to "fire up your career." Yet she graciously avoids bragging about how she used Facebook to catapult herself to stardom. Lacy's personal assistant is just getting started on the job, so we thought we'd help out: More »
Geek Love
Chris Messina and Tara Hunt: It's still a breakup even if no one blogs it
Web 2.0 wunderkinds Tara Hunt and Chris Messina hooked up, broke up, and now leave their company and a San Francisco magazine profile behind. Can Internet People run their relationships like their businesses?, we're meant to wonder, the tease of a question splayed out against the story's backdrop of conference-going glamor, multiblogged dates, and come-ons delivered in the form of schwag T-shirts. We 100-worded it so you can get back to Twittering about the lover you're not quite ready to leave yet: More »
Politics
GOP getting this social network "friend" thing all wrong
BarackBook is the Republican National Committee's new faux-cial network. As a campaign tool, it's supposed to make clear the connections between Obama and his "questionable" friends, like "60's Radicals!" William Ayers of the Weather Underground and Marilyn Katz of the Students for a Democratic Society. They have cute profile photos, sure, but where are the Last Night's Party-style gossip shots of Obama circa 1968 in a Mao baby tee? Users can send a donation to the GOP; they cannot send John McCain a Friends-for-Sale request.
Cuil
5 most likely Cuil misspellings, defined!
"Cuil? Isn't that French for 'ass'?" It's not, but you'll find that out soon enough when you can't remember the name of search engine Cuil.com. Here's a petite roundup of what other domains Cuil should have grabbed — and one they actually did — before launch. More »
blogging for dollars
Premier women-in-blogging conference can't seem to make up its mind
Who's most poised to break "blogging's glass ceiling?" The New York Times pegs BlogHer, the yearly convention and ad network, as the center of discussion on how women ought to get more attention online — and the cash that comes with it. The core issue is that there are at least two very divergent camps within BlogHer. More »
Porn
Even porn execs have bitter domain-name battles
The Fed love a good porn investigation. Allegedly, John Gray, CEO of the strip-club-industrial complex Spearmint Rhino, has been illegally taking control of domains owned by his former business partner, Michael Ninn, best known for the kind of arty, high-gloss hardcore films that almost take themselves too seriously to be porn. The FBI is rumored to be investigating. On the one hand, it's good that the naked-lady biz has its corporate-level disputes treated fairlly by the cops. On the less-lubed hand? The tipster alerting us to this case offers a better remedy: Perhaps Mr. Gray could focus on his actual naked-lady biz and drop the overpriced drinks and cover charges. (Photo via AVN)
Superficial
Who got a Brazilian wax for the TechCrunch party tonight?
Why is my friend who's going to the TechCrunch party at August Capital tonight telling me about the state of her area this late in the day on IM? No, she's not a working girl. Who would invite an escort to the TechCrunch party anyway? Any pro there tonight is a regular mistress of her sugar daddy, not a one-night engagement. There's just too much margin for Flickr'd error there. Our conversation: More »
sex trade
How Craigslist's Erotic Services helps cops stay busy -- and get busy
"Police have arrested 16 men in a prostitution sting in which they posted an ad for sex on Craigslist.org." "Craigslist prostitution sting nets 8 arrests." "10 men arrested. The department launched the sting using an advertisement for "sexual activities" on the online classified site Craigslist.org." I see one of these stories every few hours, every day — and recognize them for what they are: Your local police department's press releases. Here's how it goes when law enforcement go laptop to laptop with prostitutes, in your neighborhood! More »
Politics
Child Online Protection Act gets sent to time-out a third time
Defeated a third time this week: the Child Online Protection Act, a 10-year-old law deemed unenforceable twice by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and once by the Supreme Court. The American Civil Liberties Union argued that though the law is written supposedly to prohibit minor's access to "harmful" materials online, it could land your average sex blogger selling CafePress g-strings up to six months imprisonment for not blocking underage Web users from their site. Though the guidelines for what's considered "harmful" have been deemed overbroad, it's anticipated that the Bush Administration will seek another appeal. Better hurry if he wants to block Obamaporn before he rolls out of office. (Photo by Silveira Neto)
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