Online Adult Industry

Sitting in E-Business, learning all about the online adult industry was a bit of a strange experience for me. On one hand, it made me quite uncomfortable while on the other hand I was completely astonished at the statistics involved with this type of industry.

Between 2001 and 2005 visits to pornographic websites have doubled with the majority of this being for recreational use. This is true, even while more and more children and women are becoming more susceptible to abuse and violence due to the pornography industry.

I was shocked to see the size of the Pornography industry being as big as $57 billion worldwide, with Internet accounting for $2.5 billion of this. Another fact that I couldn't believe was that porn revenue is bigger than all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises put together, and all revenues combined from ABC, CBS, and NBC. I had no idea of the size of this industry. Pornography websites also account for 12% of all websites on the Internet.

However the online adult industry has revolutionised the development of the internet. It was ahead of all other websites, as it was one of the first industries to develop video streaming, live chats, web cam and video conferencing, payment systems, security systems and fee based subscriptions to the Internet. Its online advertising methods were also quite advanced at an early stage with the development of banner ads, ads associated with works, traffic for cash ads and pay-per-click ads.

I don't pay much attention to the fact that there is an industry like the pornography industry, but whenever I do think about it, I don't really agree with it all that much as I find it quite degrading towards women, children and I suppose men aswell. However, the technical advances that the risk takers, in the online porn industry have helped in shaping other website worldwide with their security systems and payment methods.

NAMA

I wasn't totally sure what exactly National Asset Management Agency was all about, so I went and tried to research it a little. My understanding of it is that NAMA is not a bank but an asset management company.
The objective of it is that it will take every bank's land and property debts and put them all into NAMA. This means that NAMA will become the biggest landowner in the country with debts of between €80billion and €90billion. This leaves every other bank free to resume lending money out to people.
NAMA could be in existence for as much as 10-15yrs as a long term solution to the recession and the country's debt.

Social Networking

Social networking sites such as 'My Space' 'Facebook' and 'bebo' are all forms of virtual communities. A virtual community is a gathering place for people who all share various interests and relationships in some form or another.

Virtual communities are non-geographically bound and so these communities therefore enable people from all across the world to have conversations and communicate with each other about many different topics. Therefore the community must be user friendly and must also made interesting to the user.

Facebook for me has become a part of everyday life. I must admit, I check it one quite a regular basis, being probably more than once or twice a day. I think the ability to check how my friends across the globe are and what they are up to is brilliant. Uploading pictures, sending private mails and posting public comments and opinions is a great way of keeping up-to-date with everyones day to day life. Extra features on facebook, enable me to keep up-to-date with TV programmes, news paper articles, friends birthdays and up and coming events.
I can't remember what life was like with out networking sites like facebook but I couldn't imagine what life today would be like without it.