International Law

With the Web 2.0 Expo being held this week, Wired's Regina Lynn instead offers seven reasons why you'd be better off going to sex conferences instead:

When it comes to technology, it's the great unfulfilled needs that matter most. That's where the next fortunes will be made. But if you're in the tech biz, how do you know what users want if you're hanging out with techies all the time?

You turn to sex. Here are seven reasons why your tech company should send you to sex conferences like Sex 2.0, Arse Elektronica and Sex in Video Games rather than to mainstream events like this week's Web 2.0 Expo.

 

1. You'll learn what people do with tech in private.

Even if your company springs for usability testing and focus groups, people aren't going to admit what they do when they think no one's watching. My friend who put an extra monitor in her office so she could dedicate one screen just to Facebook isn't going to reveal at a technology summit what she does with it at night. At a sex conference, however, that personal information can become a bona fide user case study.

 

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4. Young people -- your future customers -- do it with tech.

There's money in bridging old-school romance with new media, and the sex-positive community knows how to make that leap better than anyone. When today's youth get out of school, they're going to remake the world the way they want it -- and that means tech will be an essential ingredient in courtship, romance and sex. It's so essential to young people's communication now that they don't even realize they're doing it. And this is at a time when they're still spending most of their time surrounded by their peers. Just wait until they're out of school and in the workforce.

 

5. Sex bloggers reveal more than other people. A lot more.

Users in focus groups don't always possess the communication skills to get their true messages across. They also don't know what they don't know. Sex bloggers, on the other hand, are happy to communicate their needs, in minute detail, to someone they believe can satisfy them. Buy them a drink after-hours and you're in for something more fulfilling than the most comprehensive requirements-gathering meeting ever.

 

6. Sex conferences are tech conferences.

Until recently, sex conventions fell into two basic categories: medicinal/clinical and pornographic. Now, social-media pioneers are creating smaller, targeted gatherings that treat sexuality and technology as inseparable. Five years from now, this won't be shocking. And the gatherings won't be that small, either. Not that size matters.

 

Read more here.  Interestingly, Information World's Mitch Wagner spotted a Tweet that suggests some were doing there best to combine the Web 2.0 Expo with sex:

On my way to the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes, I came across this funny Twitter message from journalist Rafe Needleman.