September 05, 2003
How much porn is online, anyway?
Check this out: A site that automatically generates a gallery of 104 pictures chosen randomly from Altavista. It's programmed by the fine folks behind ga2so.com, and my friend El Rey found it for me.
Here's the thing: Since the images are randomly selected, they're an interesting way to divine the nature of online pictorial content. What do people post? Plenty of really horrible shots of family vacations, obscure inventions, and corporate infographics, for sure. But El Rey had his own observation: "Judging by what I've seen," he wrote, "the Internet is about 5 to 10 per cent poorly-lit porn."
Which is, you know, rather less porn than I'd expected. Remember the famous 1995 Carnegie-Mellon study that claimed to have studied newsgroup images and determined that 85% of them were pornographic? Wired issued an immediate smackdown of the study, but I'd still have expected that there would be a colossal amount of smut online. Still, judging by my own perusal of those Altavista images, I'd say the percentage is even smaller than El Rey suggested; it looks more like 3 to 4 per cent.
Which makes me wonder -- how would that percentage stack up against the real world? Or to put it another way: Of all the content produced in the entire world in every medium (television, magazines, books, etc), what fraction is porn? Does such a metric exist? I surfed around a while looking to see if anyone had ever attempted to uncover such a weird statistic, with no luck (though I did find nearly-as-weird material, including a study of "how much pornography there is in Finland at the beginning of the 21st century").
My favorite find, though, was Porncheck -- an online tool that lets you "you make sure your computer always has exactly the right amount of porn." It's a joke, of course, but a funny one, and with a civil-rights edge:
Note: No actual porn scan was performed. This is just a bogus scare tactic for your amusement. We have no way of seeing what's on your hard drive; we're just echoing the http values back to you.
But if this demonstration frightened you, your reaction could indicate excess porn on your computer. On the other hand, if you weren't scared at all, not even a little bit, that could be a warning sign of insufficient porn.
Only you can be the judge of whether your computer has too much pornography. (Actually, that's not strictly true. A judge, for example, could be the judge.)
Oh, and by the way? If you're at work and have a no-porn policy, do not click on that original random-Altavista-picture link. Or if you do, don't come blaming me when you get fired.
(Thanks to El Rey for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at September 05, 2003 08:40 PM
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I think it might be more then then 5 - 10% if only because much of those porn images are hidden within subscription-based sites...or so I hear.
Craig made the point I was going to -- the reason you're not getting more porn is the reason the New York Times doesn't show up when you do a Google search on a major news topic: the content is behind a subscription-only lockout.
Well, true about the pay-for services. But still, I'd imagine there's a crapload of free porn online, too; the "business", as it were, survives by offering mucho free stuff in hopes of luring enough folks to lay down cash for the "good" stuff (in an interesting foil to the music industry, of course, which hasn't yet entirely grokked the idea of suckering people in with free stuff). So the 5 to 10 per cent amount still seems low to me.
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3) Since you do have individual archive pages, it's not really necessary to run the mt-comments.cgi script to view the comments on an entry. Instead, you could have the link point to the comment listings on the Individual Archive Page. This would cut down on CPU usage on the server, which would, again, make your site more responsive.
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Mr. Sullivan, I believe if you had been born Guatemalan, Iranian, Chilean, Palestinian, or a few other nationalities, that you too would lay a lot of the blame at the feet of the U.S.
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7.8 GB? That would be a little more than 90,000 page hits (if you ignore the existence of comments). Interesting, I've been curious about the readership of some of these blogs (whether anybody actually reads them), but they never post anything about that.
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My comment is directed to MORONS like BULLDOG and all the others who believe that the War with Iraq is the same as the War on terrorism. The events are totally unrelated as far as Islamic extremists go Iraq is the last place you'll find them. I like to remind all that Ossama "Bin Forgotten" was born in Saudi Arabia along with 16 other Hi jackers killed on 9/11. As for Bulldogs comment about buying weed supports Terrorism that is just one more Myth the U.S. goverment is using to brainwash its citizens in order to generate support for is War on Drugs. As far as I know Marijuana is grow locally in grow houses. Its time that the American public stop believing all the government propoganda and start thinking for themselves. How many innocent cilvilians have to die before you wake up and smell the coffee. I applaud REM and all the "Liberals" who encourage the public to really think about what's going on before your government takes away any more of your rights and liberties or before anymore innocent people are killed.
Of course, if you end up losing your comment this way, it's not my fault. =)
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