Fleshbot Gets More Revealing

Nick Denton is a genius and appears to have the attachments to go with it. The president of Gawker Media, and the man behind news service Moreover, gossip-blog Gawker, techno-blog Gizmodo, and the super-secret Lafayette Project, will unveil his latest creation next week called Fleshbot. Simply put, Fleshbot will be a pornography review in blog format. (Something tells me Andrea Dworkin just went to DEFCON 2.)

Since I started blogging over two years ago I have opined from time to time about what kinds of weblogs could actually make money. If past performance is indicative of future results, then Denton might have hit the mother load. At the dawn of the dot.com age the only sites making money were those with an inclination towards more carnal subjects. A weblog along the same lines combined with Denton's penchant for getting noticed could really score. For whatever moral qualms you may have, the reality is that a more corporeal weblog is going to generate traffic.

Up until now there have been very few details disclosed about Fleshbot. I got lucky yesterday and managed to catch up with Nick Denton to chat a bit about this new experiment in Bloggerville. In the spirit of other newsworthy memo leaking, Nick leaked an internal memo about Fleshbot to me. Here are some selected excerpts:

"Fleshbot is a geeky porn review. It is an intelligent guide to the images and video proliferating on the web. People say that porn is popular. It's not popular enough. Even though consumption is increasingly acceptable, guys don't casually recommend porn sites to each other."

"Fleshbot should not be in good taste. That's the mistake that too many publishers have made. In order to make porn more socially acceptable, they turn it into erotica, and that's just not the same thing....So, if it's not erotica, it's not literate smut, it's not academic, what's IS Fleshbot? Well, it's own thing."

"Just because porn is sleazy or hardcore, doesn't mean it can't be introduced in an intelligent fashion....Computer-generated porn is produced by a weird underground of artists and perverts, who trade wireframe body parts. That's interesting. There's no reason why one can't write about porn from the perspective of the pop art historian. And that's what will legitimize Fleshbot as a subject of polite, if slightly risque, conversation."

"One way to be interesting, and slightly different, is to focus on the New Porn -- that produced or distributed by digital technology." - Gawker Media internal memo

Nick Denton is of course still leaving something to the imagination, and that should get some buzz going until Fleshbot launches during the first week of November. Though the content is not my cup of tea I understand where Denton is going. I read Gawker now and will probably read Gawker L.A. even though I don't live in either city. Fleshbot is just content for a different audience in Bloggerville.

The Internet is an electrified reflection of the disparate world we live in. I am sure that many people will object to Fleshbot's content and I want to read their side of the story as well. I also think where Denton is going with his microcontent model is more gripping than the actual content. Stay tuned...