I’m in the midst of trying to develop both a sub-site specifically geared towards adult site owners (to help manage your listing/s) AND a new (free) members site for readers, where you can do things like add your own reviews and ratings (a’la Amazon) , store bookmarks, and other things.

Elliott is in coding geek mode, and new Wordpress developments make this way easier to do myself, so I’m pretty excited. Anyhow, I’ll be inviting some of you to beta test the behind the scenes version in the coming weeks. Yay!

what else: um. We are going to Roatan (Honduras) for a dive trip in a couple of weeks, one of the main reasons that I missed the Xbiz awards. We were nominated under the best site/portal category for the first time in awhile, so I really wanted to be there tonight. Wish us luck, you never know..

k, bye for now..
~Janie

Fifi is proving to be every bit as kick-ass as we’d hoped, actually she’s even exceeded my expectations. She handled everything while we were gone, and we returned to neatly organized piles of questions, fresh flowers in the offices, and nothing terribly pressing because she has the art of customer management down to a T. Elliott and I are both committed to making sure she remains very happy here.

Now that I’m back, I’m about to get started on a small site revamp, with the wonderful woman who did the last one for me four years ago. We run a bit of the site on WP and we’re batting around the idea of switching the whole site over to a WP backend. What I like about the possibilities is that I will finally be able to customize ads to match the category someone is viewing (right now, I don’t change out ads enough and they are the same ones, category to category) and add other category-specific content in the sidebars. I think it’ll make it a lot better browsing experience to pull up a category page, and have the sidebar with related janeology terms, related categories, and so on.

While I was gone, I pretty much stayed a tiny bit connected via Twitter. I’m finding Twitter to be a love/hate relationship, but I’ll expand on that at some later date. I didn’t have email, so I’m still catching up on the last two weeks of that. At any rate, stay tuned, we’re changing and updating and getting better around here. :)

~Janie

Anyhow, I was browsing through recent site submissions and came across an online store promising “the largest selection of vibrators anywhere”, with 8,000+ in their listings. And I was thinking about that issue, about how more isn’t always better. I don’t think everyone has the same taste in vibrators, as my $300 (at the time) JeJoue that I used only once can attest to. However, I also think it’s unlikely that there are 8,000 products on the market that are all good quality, and I’d rather go to a sextoy shop that does some of the work of choosing for me, rather than dump every product under the sun in there.

Which brings me to this site. How much of that editing should we do? Do I list the bad sites? We always have, sometimes as consumer warnings, sometimes to comment on icky portrayals of sex, and so on. But should I maybe finally dump that and just try to put up the good ones? And then, how do I decide what the good ones are? It seems so much more arbitrary than a more solid thing like whether a toy is a cheap piece of crap that will break, and thus shouldn’t even be offered. I’m not sure on this one. I mean we do enough weeding out that you’re still far less likely to get caught in a pornado from any link off of our site, but should I strip out the sites entirely for poor design? For signup policies that you have to read carefully?

I start to think about that every time we start re-reviewing old GOOD sites that are not being found in the slog of everything we have listed. And I’m still not sure.

I also had a great time catching up with Vamp – I know not everyone who reads my blog has been around long enough to remember, but Vamp was the second person ever to be hired to write reviews, probably around 1999 if memory serves. She took an extended break for school, but happily she’s back now for awhile at least. I would say that of anyone I’ve ever had here at the site, she’s the most unbiased, open-minded reviewer. There is no kink that is off limits, or that she can’t write about in a perfectly lovely and enthusiastic way.

One of the ideas we were batting around at dinner was trying to either do some podcasts, or even little videos to release on YouTube about various fetishes and kinks. Sort of a “kink 101″ intro to the hows and whys of various things. I know many of our readers know plenty and don’t need this, but for every sexually savvy, kink-pos reader there are probably 10 others who’ve never heard of some of the activities we list, so it’s with that audience in mind that we’re considering it.

Elliott had never met Vamp before, so once we had our dinner we met up with both him and Vamp’s partner to have a glass of wine and chat more. He was a wonderful guy, and has an interest in sailing so we might be introducing him to that sport next sailing season.

Feeling very positive and happy today…

Now on to other things: I am attempting to re-categorize and update the review index. I do not want to make it too extensive, because the longer the list, sometimes the more difficult it is to find what you want. However, I do want to keep it as sex-positive and gender-positive as possible, while still making it easy for people to figure out the categories. This is important, and falls into the “not everyone lives in the love bubble” area. Terminology that might be totally normal to me, may not be so well known to the very broad audience that comes here. So, with advice from the wonderful Courtney Trouble, and of course AAG, I am in the midst of the work in progress, shown below, and am eliciting comments/suggestions. Email or comment away, any and all help is appreciated.

Mainstream:
Amateur (Solo girl)
Amateur (Multiple people)
Indie
Hardcore
Softcore
Fine Art Nude
Glamour/Beauty
Vintage/Pin-up
Porn Star
Celebrity
Asian
Latina
Black
Interracial
BBW
Mature
Men
Public Sex / Flashing
Sextoy / Machine
Natural Breasts (silicone-free zone)
Blowjob
Gangbang
FTM (Female to Male)
MTF / Shemale
Gay Male
Queer
Girl/Girl
Lesbian/Dyke

BDSM:
Bondage: Women
Bondage: Men
BDSM – M/f
BDSM – F/m
BDSM – F/f
BDSM – M/m
Spanking
BDSM Art
Community Sites

Fetish:
Foot Fetish
Panties/Stockings/Garters
Voyeur / Upskirt
Forced Feminization/ Sissy
Latex/PVC/Rubber
Enemas/Watersports
Goth/Vamp
Pregnant/Lactating
Bodybuilder
Pony Play
Fighting / Wrestling
Ageplay (Adult Babies)
Balloons
WAM (Wet & Messy)
Hirsute
Tickling
Girls with Glasses
Other Assorted Fetishes?

Adult Services:
Online Dating
Swinger Community Sites
BDSM Community Sites
Phone Sex
BDSM/Fetish Phonesex
Podcasts / Internet Radio

Adult Products:
Sextoys / Safer Sex Supplies
Lingerie
Corsets
Fetishwear
Plus Size Positive
Shoes
Books/Magazines
eBooks
Podcasts
DVDs
Custom Videos
Worn Panties
BDSM Gear
Audio / Aural-erotica
Cross-dressing apparel?

The Written Word:
Sex Columnists
Advice/Education
Polyamory Info
BDSM Info
GLBT Info
Adult Blogs – Personal
Adult Blogs – Product Review
Adult Blogs – Photos
Erotic Fiction
Alt/Sci-fi Erotic Fiction
BDSM Erotic Fiction
Humor/Satire

Sex Industry:
Website Design Services
Website Hosting
Sex Work Info / Advice
Sex Educators
Adult Casting
Adult Industry Awards
Adult Affiliate Programs

Highlights:
Porn Produced by Women
Award Winning Websites
Staff Favorites

what say you, dearest readers and contributors and site owners?

So here is my question to you, dear readers who have stuck with me for all of these years: what would YOU like to see if you could create a user account here at JG? Just a place to store bookmarks? A way to write your own reviews or comments about sites? A place to post photos? the ability to friend other users? I’m trying to flesh out our ideas so we can proceed. Send me an email, or leave a comment here, and let me know your ideas.

A supportive reader wrote me this morning (hi, FT!) and asked what about our site was different. I’ve been looking around at what other sites of my ilk are doing, and the one thing that has always been different about us is simply that we review ALL kinds of stuff. Most review sites only do mainstream porn, and only paysites. I like that we include everything from blogs to phonesex to educational/informational. That is one thing that will not change. Oh, and I also think we’re a hell of a lot more sex positive in general. Another thing that won’t change. And if we do decide on users being able to create accounts, the TOS are definitely going to be strict about not being an asshole. One of the things that makes me cringe the most is going to a site that allows user comments and seeing just crude, awful things being said about the performers on various sites. For every person who seems to find it a personal affront that there is more than one standard of beauty, is another person who appreciates that non-mainstream beauty.

Anyhow… back to work, I’m actually getting really excited about some of our plans. :)

~Janie

The first one I went to in 1998 was a bit of a shock to the system. I was just this single mom who had started this website that was all of a sudden popular. I didn’t know anything about the business side of porn, or making money from talking about sex, or performing sex. It was eye-opening to say the least. There were people there like me, then there were people who embodied the media stereotype of “porn star” and just about everything in between.

I sort of got sucked in to it all. From 98 – 2001, I started doing a bit of modeling for my own site, and for other photographers. I had a longtime journal reader (who sadly, has passed away) write me to say “be careful what you pretend to be, you end up becoming it.” But I have to say it was totally a blast letting that side of myself come out. Everyone has so many facets, and so many of us are stuck only getting to show one side to people. A balanced alter-ego is a wonderful thing.

Every once in awhile, Elliott and I talk about maybe going to some industry things again, getting re-involved. I don’t know whether that will happen, but I hope AAG has a blast going. I’ll be thinking of her fondly. (Oh, and she’ll have a bit of JG swag to hand out while there too. yay!)

~Jane

Today in new listings, you’ll see a couple of old favorites updated: first, AAG beat me to the review of X-Muse.net (which I mentioned in my last post) and I can’t say I blame her. We do sort of vie for the fun reviews and I’m glad she got to see it. Then I just posted an update on Elaisted.com, which is a gorgeous site from a Seattle photographer.

I always feel sort of melancholy when I have contact with people who have been around as long as I have. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because it makes me sort of wistful about those super-fun days when everything seemed so new and fresh and exciting. At any rate, both sites are wonderful and you should go look at them, so go to new listings and see for yourself.

~Jane

reading: I Was Told There’d Be Cake – by Sloane Crosley

listening to: some random emo rock my 15 year old has on. :)

In unhappy news, my beloved dog Max died earlier this week. He truly was the Best Dog Ever. I’ve admittedly been dragging around all week in a funk because I miss him. He had a good life, and it happened here at home with all of us near him. Totally unexpected though, it had only seemed like his age was slowing him down a bit, not that anything was really wrong.

Triathlon training is going. Not well, just going. It’s coming up now in only 2 1/2 weeks, the big day. This weekend we’re doing an open water swim for the first time, and Washington being what it is, the lake is cold enough to need wetsuits. Ugh. If there is anything I hate, it’s being cold AND wet. But I can do it!

~Jane

I decided to login in to BlackLabelAds to make sure nothing was amiss, however. I’m very glad I did, and very pissed off. While told at the time that BlackLabel was launched that all account info would be transferred the SAME as it was set in Adbrite, apparently someone over there decided to change my acceptance policy about a week ago, on fullpage ads without so much as informing me, much less asking my consent. This greatly pisses me off. I changed the settings back to what they were before (it looks from the statistics there as if this only happened for about a week) – and the beautiful part of it is, my site was changed, over 13,000 of my readers were subjected to fullpage ads that looked like redirects, and for all of this I got a whopping $35.

I’ve turned down fullpage ads for $1.00 PER view because I never wanted to sully my website with them. Grrr…