Pretty bad, it seems. According to the San Jose Mercury News, even pornography isn’t selling at the moment.

That’s the glum assessment of those in the adult entertainment industry, hundreds of whom gathered last week for the annual Cybernet Expo conference in San Francisco. The industry, now a multibillion-dollar online business, has discovered that people just aren’t willing to click-to-pay for vice the way they once did.

“Times are tough,” Jay Kopita, director of operations for the expo, said with a sigh. “You’d think this would be recession-proof.”

Turns out pay-per-view sex is just another sector struggling in the downturn.

In many ways, the three-day gathering that ended Saturday was like any other Silicon Valley conference. It was held at the Holiday Inn and featured sessions on contracts and social media, speed networking and lots of late-afternoon schmoozing over drinks. “Sometimes these can be boring,” admitted Ella Black, a performer with girl-next-door looks who just launched her own ‘solo girl’ site.

On the other hand, shoptalk overheard in a hallway included the challenges of performing certain sex scenes. One popular seminar on shooting adult film featured a disrobing model. An after-hours party was held at fetish company Kink.com.

During day hours, at least, the focus was clearly on business. Indeed, attendees said the mood was more somber than the go-go pre-recession days.

I’m at the JISC Digital Content Conference 2009 (Twitter: #jdcc09), located in a strange hotel/conference centre in the ‘Cotswolds Water Park’, which I suspect is a former gravel pit.

As usual, there were network problems!

Passageway leading to the Catholic Chaplaincy. Flickr version here.

Souvenir of a perfect day. An unexpected visit by some good American friends, an impromptu lunch in the garden, champagne, gossip and the long peacefulness of an English country afternoon. It doesn’t get much better than this.

Days Like This is also the title of one my favourite Van Morrison songs.

When it’s not always raining there’ll be days like this
When there’s no one complaining there’ll be days like this
When everything falls into place like the flick of a switch
Well my mama told me there’ll be days like this

When you don’t need to worry there’ll be days like this
When no one’s in a hurry there’ll be days like this
When you don’t get betrayed by that old Judas kiss
Oh my mama told me there’ll be days like this

When you don’t need an answer there’ll be days like this
When you don’t meet a chancer there’ll be days like this
When all the parts of the puzzle start to look like they fit
Then I must remember there’ll be days like this.

Flickr version here.

“Twitter is like SMS is for old people.”

From a Tweet by BBHLabs citing an overheard remark by a 13-year-old.

From today’s Guardian.

The owner of the O2 arena could face an insurance liability of up to £300m after the death of Michael Jackson, who had been scheduled to play a series of sell-out gigs starting in the summer.

AEG Live, which persuaded Jackson to stage the 50-date run at the former Millenium Dome, admitted earlier this year that it was finding it difficult to insure the This Is It performances after the initial schedule of 10 concerts grew.

Doubts over whether Jackson would be fit enough both mentally and physically to complete the extended run of gigs increased the potential insurance bill to £300m, according to a report by Reinsurance magazine in March.

Insurers were reluctant to take on such a liability and instead, the AEG chief executive Randy Phillips was reported at the time as saying that the company would be willing to “self-insure” to get the shows to go ahead.

“It’s a risk we’re willing to take to bring the King of Pop to his fans,” he said.

Admirable sentiment. But bad business decision, if true.

And how about this from ArsTechnica on the wider impact on the Net?

The news of pop icon Michael Jackson’s collapse and subsequent death sent ripples across the Web on Thursday afternoon, affecting numerous services and sparking yet another spam campaign. Twitter, Google, Facebook, various news sites, and even iTunes were practically crushed under the weight of the sudden spike in Internet traffic. The phenomenon may not be new on an individual level, but combined across services, it was truly one of the most significant in recent memory.

When news first broke that the Jackson had collapsed in his home, Twitter was immediately abuzz. There were several points when the Ars staff observed between 6,000 and 13,000 new tweets per minute mentioning Michael Jackson before Twitter began to melt down—all before anyone other than TMZ.com was reporting his death. Of course, most of us are intimately familiar with the famed Fail Whale at this point, though Twitter’s meltdown was mostly reflected in a major slowing of the service and the inability to send new tweets.

In fact, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told the L.A. Times that the news of Jackson’s passing caused the biggest spike in tweets per second since the US Presidential Election. (Similarly, Facebook—also known as Wannabe Twitter—saw a spike in status updates that was apparently three times more than average for the site, though a spokesperson said the site remained free of performance issues.)

Google, on the other hand, began receiving so many searches for news about Jackson that it caused the search engine to believe it was under attack. The site went into self-protection mode, throwing up CAPTCHAs and malware alerts to users trying to find news. A Google spokesperson described the incident as “volcanic” compared to other major news events, confirming that there was a service slowdown for some time.

On the other hand, Rory Cellan-Jones has this:

But did the internet actually buckle? Well, there was some strain – but it seems to have come through well.

In the United States, a company called Keynote, which monitors internet performance, says popular news sites showed marked slowdowns for three hours from about 2230 BST: “The average speed for downloading news items doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White from Keynote. “During the same period, the average availability of sites dropped from almost 100% to 86%.”

But guess what: in Europe overnight, there was no spike in internet traffic. Interoute, which operates Europe’s largest fibre optic voice and data network, sent me graphs (see below) showing traffic through the three key internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. At all three exchanges, traffic was either around the same as normal overnight, or, in London’s case, actually a little lower.

… in 1963, JFK visited West Berlin and made his famous declaration: “Ich bin ein Berliner”.

I’ve been in a lot of discussions recently about the ‘death’ of (print) newspapers. What strikes me most about the print perspective is its almost childish impatience for immediate results. Faced with the reality of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the future emerges more slowly than the past dissolves, print journalists decry the online future as a revenue-free chimera. Because online news doesn’t make money at the moment, they think it’s a hopeless prospect. (Another problem is that they are obsessed with the continuation of a particular output format — the newspaper — rather than the function that it performs, which is journalism. But that’s another story.)

I can understand their angst as a treasured way of working becomes unviable, but the idea that we could instantly switch from an industry built on, and shaped by, 19th-century technology into one based on networked technology is historically naive. In my Oxford seminar I used the example of what happened when broadcast radio arrived in the US in the 1920s. Entrepreneurs were as puzzled by how to make money from radio then as newspapers owners are by the Web. It took at least a decade to figure out to figure out a business model that would work for broadcast radio — and the solution was eventually found by a detergent manufacturer, Proctor and Gamble — which is how we got the soap opera. But in that decade lots of companies went bust trying to make money from the new medium. Yet, in the end, radio was the medium that changed the world, because it created the modern mass market. For the first time, people across the continental United States could have the same media experience at the same time — and advertisers could address a mass market.

Much the same is happening now. Nobody yet has a clear idea of a business model that will support journalism in a networked age. But I have absolutely no doubt that models will be found — in time. That’s the lesson of history.

Another lesson of history that grief-stricken print journalists ignore is that the modern print newspaper did not spring, ready-made, from its cradle. In fact it took a long time to evolve. This was the point made in an admirable post by Howard Owens on his blog.

For more than a decade, we expected to build online news organizations that could support a super structure of the modern newspaper newsroom — with the all the reporters and editors and big story packages (look at all the emphasis we put on big Flash multimedia productions) and that we could keep doing journalism just the way we always did it.

While we bemoaned shovelware (taking the same exact print story and repurposing it for the Web), we took little time to really examine what might might be different about online publishing that should change the way news is gathered and presented.

That’s why we were slow to embrace blogging, slow to recognize the power of social networking, and why, even today, most newspapers treat reader interaction (re: comments on stories) as a nuisance rather than an essential part of the business.

The Big Worry of the print culture is that in the networked world nobody will do Real Journalism — all that laudable, high-end, socially-responsible, investigative, speaking-truth-to-power stuff which makes journalists feel good about themselves and their role in society. Howard Owens reminds us that the celebrated pioneers of American newspaper culture didn’t do too much of that high-minded stuff. Au contraire.

The early giants of journalism got much wrong and got much right, but little that they did would resemble journalism of the past 60 or 70 years.

They didn’t, for example, do much in the way of investigative journalism. Nelly Bly worked for the New York World, but even her greatest public service reporting — locking herself in an insane asylum — isn’t what many of today’s newsroom pundits mean by high-cost investigative journalism. it was a stunt, just like her most expensive adventure, going around the world in 80 days. That really brought down a president, didn’t it?

Most of the other muckrakers who set the stage for investigative journalism didn’t even work for newspapers. They wrote for magazines and published books.

It took a long time for newspapers to build the cash flow to afford big time, expensive investigative journalism, and for publishers to recognize its value (and some of them still aren’t convinced) in helping to retain readers.

So if it took newspapers more than 100 years to build the business and content models that we all now cherish, why do we expect a fully formed online model to emerge in just 10 years?

Exactly. So the moral of the story is: patience. Journalism will continue even if print newspapers decline or even die. The world doesn’t end here.

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