Shirk

Back in the good old days - before MSN, Google and Yahoo - Internet kinky life was simple. There were some discussion lists, the Usenet groups and the occassional chatroom. Life was simple and easy and a kinky pal was easily found. These days, most people are not so sure. In fact, most have lost their trusted resources and footholds. The question is: now what?

It all started out with Yahoo rounding up the majority of discussion groups and lists, turning them into Yahoo groups. First, Yahoo waded out the vast majority of adult oriented groups (they had picked up first, for example through acquiring HotLists) without notice. Whatever groups managed to survive have largely deteriorated to spam-nests, especially since the average-not-so-clever spammer started to buy email addresses from harvesters who do little more than providing them with a ton of dead and useless email adresses, including those, meant to be the group moderator addresses provided by Yahoo and Smartgroups.

The next major setback for the adult internet life was MSN. After quite happily allowing everyone to set up an MSN-group, regardless its nature, MSN - giving in to pressure groups from the USA - suddenly decided that was not a good plan. The United States Bible Belt seems to rule the world and one written complaint from Jane Doe out of Nowhere City, Utah seems to become the standard for what is proper and decent and what is not. MSN came up with a "solution", the major flop "WorldGroups" that doesn't take off, mainly because it is a poor set up in the first place and secondly people see no reason to fill up Bill Gates' pockets further than the already are. Now MSN has - per Oct. 1rst, 2006 - completely abandoned the chat facility for any MSN group and that is the end of the last of the kinky Mohekans.

So, where do they do?

It is simply absurd to think that the approximately one third of the worlds' population that - according to most polls - is into some form of kinky sex, will let itself regulate by overly puristic companies, providers, action groups or individuals. Neither will the 8 billion dollar adult Internet industry give up. So yes, like water this enormous stream of potential customers and voters will find its way. If it can't go through the mountain, it will find its way around it.

Blogging, podcasting and vodcasting certainly is one way to do that. An increasing number of people run their own "newspaper", radiostation or even daily television show on the Internet and these things are extremely popular. A good number among them is adult-oriented.

But these are only minor efforts, compared to profile/dating/exposure sites, such as the 1 million people big MySpace networking site, its competitor Hyves and a wide variety of regional similar facilities that offer the same, but in the local language. These are places where much of the kinky life really happening. Not to mention their entirely "adult" oriented equivalents.

And another good example are forum sites, most of them being new initiatives that offer both an informational site with lots and lots of pointers and information and a community, that allows for posting, finding friends and lovers and much more.

So, it is a simple matter of redirecting your adult searchlite to other places. Where, with a bit of effort, you'll find entire new crowds. With: more fun, more personal control and less "big brother watching".

Hans Meijer, a Dutch former journalist and government spokesmen, is the chairman for the Powerotics Foundation. This organisation is dedicated to provide quality information about alternative lifestyles.