Reasons for picking up Writer’s Digest and Reader’s Digest
I didn't plan it this way, but I have work in the recent issues of both Writer's Digest and Reader's Digest (Canada). So October is all about the Digests, yo. The only hitch is that neither piece is online as of now. So you need to get the print editions. (Or buy the digital edition of WD!)
For Writer's Digest, I wrote an essay about my experience correcting errors in my book, Regret The Error. It's somewhat similar to the monologue I did for Definitely Not The Opera recently. One difference is that my WD piece offers advice to writers about preventing errors. And it includes an image of the accuracy checklist I produced earlier this year.
As for Reader's Digest, the current issue in Canada includes a lengthy excerpt from the Mafiaboy book. And Michael "Mafiaboy" Calce is on the cover. We're really thrilled about his.
Last week was a very, very good week
I'm still recovering from last week's festivities and surprises.
This recovery process included sleeping for 12 hours last night, which is almost unheard of for me, and spending most of yesterday afternoon and evening lying on a couch and trying to avoid anything resembling work. Last week was the MagNet/PWAC conference, the National Magazine Awards, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. I was involved in some way with each of them. In the end, I finished the week having given out two awards, won two of my own, and connected with editors and freelance writers from all over Canada.
It was a very, very good week. Allow me to share the highlights.
A super "super conference" -- For the first time in its more than 30 years of existence, the Professional Writers Association of Canada joined with other organizations for its annual conference. I'm a former Quebec Chapter president of PWAC and currently sit on its board of directors, a volunteer position. This year we teamed up with MagNet, the big magazine conference, the Canadian Authors Association, and Canadian Society of Magazine Editors to create a joint conference. I love my fellow PWACers and it was great for us to be able to mix with other organizations. The result was that Canadian magazine editors and writers (among other industry folks) were together in workshops and at meals. I met several editors and made some good connections.
Giving Out Awards -- As PWAC's Quebec Regional Director, I handed out the award for Regional Volunteer of the Year. Then, the next day, I announced that Jennifer Walker of Best Health magazine was the winner of PWAC's Editor of the Year Award. That was a lot of fun. Congrats to her and the two Honourable Mentions, Diana Swift of Canadian Health and Ian Johnson of CBCNews.ca.
Taking Home Some Hardware -- On Thursday night around 10:30 pm, I found out that Michal Calce and I had won the Arthur Ellis Award for non-fiction crime book of the year. Mike was at the ceremony in Ottawa (I was in Toronto at the conference) and I can honestly say that we are both shocked and thrilled by the win. The other books on the short list were very impressive and I didn't think we'd win the award. I also didn't expect the win to generate so much press coverage, which then resulted in a ton of congratulatory emails. Then, on Friday night, I received a Silver Medal at the National Magazine Awards. (Read the winning article here.) The gold in the humour category went to Bruce McCall, who contributes to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair etc. So, uh, pretty good company. And one hell of a good time.
Thanks to PWAC, MagNet, the Crime Writers of Canada, the National Magazine Awards Foundation, Penguin Group (Canada), Maisonneuve magazine, the Transatlantic Literary Agency and the other groups and people that made it possible.
Believe me, it really is an honor just being nominated
I came home from my regular Tuesday night boxing class at Blue Cat to discover that I had been nominated for a National Magazine Award. Yeah, welcome home to me. This being 2009, I found out via Twitter thanks to a message from Kim Pittaway. (She's nominated for three awards! I'm a total underachiever.) Here's the full list of nominees.
You can read my nominated story here. It was published in Maisonneuve magazine.
I'm really excited to be nominated in the Humour category, as I'm an extremely funny person. It's about time the world, or at least the magazine community, recognized how funny I am. Now you know. Why aren't you laughing?
Anyway, there are a lot of nominees in my category. One of them is probably funnier than me. Which means I probably won't win the gold medal. But as long as they have those insanely decadent chocolate fountains at the awards again this year, I'll be okay.
RenderMan to the rescue
Contained in today's Globe And Mail is the latest issuse of TQ, the paper's quarterly technology magazine. I wrote the cover story about wireless security hacker Brad "RenderMan" Haines. He's a talented white hat hacker based in Edmonton, and the profile raises a lot of important issues about wireless security. The full text is up on the Globe's website, and I've pasted it below.
RenderMan to the rescue
Dressed in a black trench coat and his trademark fedora, Brad Haines cruises city streets and malls on the hunt for wireless networks that are prime targets for hacking. Just be grateful he's one of the good guys
CRAIG SILVERMAN
Globe and Mail
July 22, 2008
One day last December, Brad Haines pulled a long black trench coat over his black shirt and pants, perched his trademark black fedora on top of his straight, shoulder-length hair and strapped on a backpack filled with a laptop and other electronics. And, like many people in Edmonton during the holiday season, he headed to the West Edmonton Mall.
The mall is home to more than 800 stores and occupies a space equivalent to roughly 48 city blocks, so Haines knew he'd have no trouble finding gifts. But he wasn't here to shop. No, this expedition was all work. His mission: Take a "warwalk" of North America's largest mall, using his equipment to search out unsecured wireless networks as he walked past the building's stores. (Do it in a car and it's called wardriving; on public transit, it's warriding.) The point of wardriving isn't to actually access anyone's wireless network—that could result in warjailing. Rather, the idea is to simply survey the number of wireless networks within the building, evaluate their level of security and alert the owners to any vulnerabilities.
Haines, 28, had been wardriving through the streets of Edmonton since 2002 and had catalogued roughly 80,000 wireless networks, whether home-based or those belonging to companies. But the mall represented uncharted territory. "Nobody had done a good wireless survey of the West Edmonton Mall, and if you throw in Christmas shopping crowds, it's a little more interesting," he says. "Everything lined up for a really good guerrilla analysis, because you have big crowds and a massive amount of spending going on. If you're thinking as an attacker, that's the time of year you want to do something, because there are so many more targets."
Haines's fondness for wardriving, plus his all-black "uniform," would lead the average executive to conclude that he's a nefarious hacker. But since he first began mapping WiFi networks in and around Edmonton, Haines has become well known as a wireless security expert, often consulting for companies and government agencies (non-disclosure agreements prevent him from naming names). And he's regularly invited to speak at major security and hacking conferences in North America and Europe, including DefCon, ShmooCon and Hackers On Planet Earth, or HOPE. (A few of his recent presentations: "Legal and Ethical Aspects of Wardriving," "Standards Bodies ... What Were These Guys Drinking?" and "New Wireless Fun From the Church of WiFi.")
Though his trademark headgear says otherwise, Haines is a so-called "white hat" hacker—one of the good guys. His corporate clients know him as Brad Haines, but he has earned the most notoriety as RenderMan, the alias he uses online and within the WiFi hacking community. Haines maintains a Website, renderlab.net, where he posts his research, reports, presentations and the occasional article. "He's pretty well known, and he's well received at the [hacker] conventions," says Frank Thornton, a Vermont-based security consultant and the co-author of Wardriving & Wireless Penetration Testing. "He's a role model for some of the people out there who are getting into this stuff."
One of Haines's key contributions to the wardriving community is a code of ethics (see page 46). It dictates that wardrivers must never connect to a network they discover, should always obey traffic laws and stay off of private property, and never use the data collected for personal gain. The seven-point list also says wardrivers should adopt the hiker motto of "take only pictures, leave only footprints." "It's one of the things he's really well known for," Thornton says.
The countless hours spent mapping and analyzing thousands of wireless networks has enabled Haines to see firsthand the rapid growth of wireless Internet access in homes and businesses, and the lack of effort put into securing them. "To put it in perspective, the first time I went out wardriving in 2002, I found 25 networks in an evening driving all over downtown Edmonton," says Haines. "I can now drive around my block and get 25 networks."
He says that five or six years ago, roughly 70% of wireless networks were completely unprotected. That means that no encryption (such as the standards WEP and WPA) was used to protect the data flowing over the network, and no password was required to join. Today, that number has shrunk to 30%, but it's still dangerously high when you factor in the huge growth in the number of networks, and the fact that many of them are now run by companies. "In absolute numbers, there are more unsecured business networks out there than before, because there's a high underlying growth," says Toffer Winslow, vice-president of product management for encryption company RSA. His company conducted a study of wireless networks in 2007 that revealed that 25% of business networks in New York, London and Paris had no encryption whatsoever. A year earlier, a survey by research firm Gartner Inc. found that 64% of U.S. businesses were planning to expand their use of wireless networks.
At the time, analyst Rachna Ahlawat said wireless networks were fast becoming a "standard part of enterprise networks, covering entire facilities, not just meeting rooms."
That means they've also become a standard target for those looking to infiltrate corporate networks. One particularly devastating corporate wireless security breach was on Haines's mind as he began planning his mall warwalk late last year. The victim was TJX Cos. Inc., a company that operates discount chains such as T.J. Maxx and Marshalls in the U.S., and Winners and HomeSense in Canada. In January, 2007, TJX revealed that attackers had gained access to systems that process and store transaction data. This enabled them to steal customer credit card numbers and driver's licence information. In the end, more than 45 million credit card numbers were compromised between 2005 and early 2007, making it the largest breach on record. "The chink in their armour seems to have been their wireless network," Haines says. "It had been a year since that happened, and so many people I know had to get new credit cards because of it. My thought was: Has anybody actually learned anything?"
Mobile technology hits the oil patch
I'm a bit late updating some of the recent work I've done. Below is a technology story I wrote for TQ magazine, which is published by The Globe And Mail. It's also online at their site here.
Bonanza in the oil patch
A Calgary company hits pay dirt with a wireless ticketing system for its workers in the field
CRAIG SILVERMAN
April 11, 2007
Tucker Wireline Services Canada; Calgary
Business An oil services company that provides oil well logging and perforation services to energy companies
Employees 200
Project
Equipping its field workers with mobile technology to eliminate an
error-prone and costly paper-based system for data capture, pricing and
invoicing
Initial cost $1 million—about $7,000 to $10,000 to
equip each team with a notebook computer, network access and
electronic-signature capture pad
Ongoing costs Network access for transmitting data from the field
ROI Close to $500,000 a year in savings thanks to improved billing and invoicing, and increased productivity
Dave Jellett was talking to a field engineer at Tucker Wireline
Services Canada a few months ago when he realized just how successful
the company's new wireless field-ticketing service has been. Jellett,
Tucker's president and chief operating officer, listened as the
engineer bemoaned the recent theft of his laptop. "He was crying the
blues because he'd lost the system and was back to paper," says Jellett.
Without his laptop, the engineer would have to go back to the
way things were done before the company began rolling out its new
remote workstations about a year ago. Roughly 75 of Tucker's 200
Canadian employees work in oil fields across Alberta, providing
services to such companies as EnCana and Suncor. Tucker lowers sensors
into newly drilled wells to take readings from the rock that help
decide how the oil company should proceed. "It's like doing an MRI for
the rock," says Jellett.
Tucker also provides "perforation" services—drilling holes
into the steel casing placed inside a well to enable it to start
producing oil. Tucker's field teams are constantly on the move,
gathering new data from different wells and performing whatever work
the oil companies need. At each stop, the team fills out a so-called
field ticket that includes all the key information about the job, along
with the cost of the services performed.
In the old paper-based system, each team had to fill out
several pages of forms and produce an invoice using a large pricing
book they had to lug from site to site. "They usually filled out the
paperwork on the fly, and it certainly added a couple of hours to every
job," says Jellett. That's big money: Each lost crew hour costs Tucker
$500.
Allowing
workers like Jack Domet to complete their paperwork in the field saves
Tucker Wireline roughly two hours per job or about $1,000.
The paperwork was then delivered by hand or sent via bus to
one of Tucker's field offices, in Medicine Hat, Leduc or Grand Prairie.
From there, it would make its way by car or bus to the Calgary
headquarters. "One of the big problems we had was the two to three
weeks' time it took to get the information into the office," says
Jellett. "That also meant delays in terms of invoicing customers and
getting paid, and getting the data associated with our operations into
the office."
Another hassle: engineers would often make mistakes while
filling out forms in the field. "Any time you're doing paper records,
the error rate associated with it is very high," says Jellett. "We
would have everything from pricing errors right though to
data-recording errors."
Tucker knew that field tickets wasted time, degraded the
quality of data and delayed the time between doing a job and getting
paid for it. So three years ago, the company partnered with Spira Data
Corp., a Calgary-based oil-field technology company, to turn its paper
forms into software. As for transmitting data directly from the field,
that fell to Telus. (The telco now sells the new system, dubbed
wireless field ticketing, to other oil services companies.)
Tucker's system works like this: Each three-person field team
(the company has 25 of them) gets a basic laptop loaded with the
ticketing software and a network card so it can connect to Telus's
high-speed wireless network (in remote areas where cell coverage is
unavailable, they can connect via satellite).
When they arrive at a well and assess what they need to do,
the team fills out an electronic field ticket; the software
automatically calculates how much the job will cost, thus reducing math
errors, and generates an invoice that's signed by the customer on site,
using a signature capture pad that plugs into the laptop. Then the team
sends all the data and invoices over the cell network back to the head
office, where it's processed.
Tucker spent about $1 million to get the system up and
running (all its field teams were wireless by August, 2006), and
Jellett says the company will save close to half a million dollars a
year, two-thirds thanks to the faster billing process, the rest from
increased employee productivity. "We felt we would pay for the whole
development of the system within the first two years of usage," says
Jellett, noting the company is on track to meet that goal.
There are other, less tangible savings. Jellett says his field teams are now able to better analyze the data.
"It allows them to focus on issues other than data entry," he
says. "Now they're actually looking at the data and trends of activity,
and analyzing and making decisions based upon the data."
Telus's projections for the system show an average reduction
of four weeks' invoicing time for clients, "a significant advantage
when you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars earned each
day," says
Telus's Allison Vale. "The default business case on the ROI
calculator for the wireless field ticketing solution comes up with a
return of $1.8 million over five years" in cost savings and faster
invoicing.
"Everything is captured within that notebook instead of in a
huge briefcase," says Jellett. "The field teams find it easier to use,
and the buy-in has been terrific. We had to do some work on the
education side with a few customers because they're stuck in the old
way of doing things.
But it's a better system for them as well because it makes
for less paper and material for them to handle." Still, he admits some
customers prefer having the old few weeks' delay before seeing an
invoice from Tucker.
"I'd be lying to you if I said that wasn't the case," Jellett says, laughing.
The 30-Minute Executive MBA
The latest issue of The Globe And Mail's Report On Business magazine features a special section, "The 30-Minute EMBA." It's a quick, useful and amusing guide offering useful advice for business execs. I wrote several articles for the guide, and have compiled them in a PDF for download. The articles include:
- PR/Media relations tips for talking to the press and public
- Executive style guide
- Mastering the all-important handshake, and avoiding inappropriate gestures
- Tips for running an effective meeting
- A guide to executive coaching
- A list of business buzzwords to ban
UPDATE: I just noticed that the content of this special section in now online here, though the PDF is a bit easier to read.
Easy entertaining from Chocolat magazine
Rogers, the largest magazine publisher in Canada, recently launched Chocolat, a new home shopping/lifestyle magazine. I contributed an article about planning an easy, fun cocktail party, also known as a 5 à 7 in Quebec. The article features some tips and suggestions, along with some great recipes (from a chef, not me). Download the PDF.
ROB Magazine: Shaving 101, Choosing your Scent, and a Wine Rack fit for a Pharaoh
I have an article in the latest issue of the Globe And Mail's Report on Business magazine. I wrote an ode to a top of the line wine rack for the magaizne's Splurge page. You can read it online here, or download the PDF to see the magazine page in all its glory here.
I also just realized that I have two previous ROB articles yet to be put up on this site. One is a comparison of razors and a guide to shaving properly. I often surprise myself at how frustrated I get over shaving products. Men tend to use horrible creams and awful after shave lotions (or none at all), and we shave entirely to quickly. This is the major regular grooming regimen we have, and yet we still don't know how to do it right. Maybe this article (PDF) can offer a little bit of help. And here's a bit of free advice: I recently tried out some products from VitaMan and they are excellent. I particularly recommend their after shave balm and face and body cleanser.
The final ROB piece is a look at some of the new men's colognes (PDF) that have recently come on the market. I found a scent expert to do a blind smelling of these scents and offer her thoughts and recommendations. Personally, I use Burberry Brit For Men. Some more free advice: If you wear cologne, make sure you aren't also using a scented soap and shampoo and deodorant. Too many scents makes no sense.
Speaking of scents, that reminds me of a recent Explainer I wrote about a proposal to ban scents in public places in Ottawa. They've already done it in my home town of Halifax, and my Mom loves it.
NewCanadian articles: Weapons in Canadian prisons, Just for Laughs Gags and a conversation with Samantha Bee
The November 2005 issue of The NewCanadian of course came out several months ago (okay, eight months ago), but I neglected to put up my articles form that issue. So here we are. As usual, I wrote three pieces: two features and one Q&A. The Q&A was with Canadian Samantha Bee and you can download the PDF here.
One of the features was about the kind of weapons that are fashioned by inmates and smuggled into prisons. I spoke with several corrections officers from across Canada who shared their stories about weapons, brawls and what they say is a lack of protection for them. Get the PDF here.
I also wrote a feature about the Gags television show. You know the one: the Canadian show with no dialog, just tons of silly pranks played on unsuspecting pedestrians. Well, it's arguably the most successful Canadian-produced television show ever. It airs in 80 countries and on 70 airlines. I took a look at why this seemingly inane show is such a powerful global success. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait for this PDF. Sorry.
Naked Ambition
I have a feature article in the first issue of The Globe And Mail's new magazine, Report On [Small] Business. Titled "Naked Ambition," it's a business profile of a Montreal couple who turned their swinging lifestyle into a major adult business. I'll put a PDF of the magazine version up soon, but you can check it out online here right now. Here's an excerpt the full piece:
The PA system pops to life. "Make some noise!" the announcer screams.
Two hundred well-lubricated fans jump to their feet as heavy rock music
pounds down from the speakers. A wrestling ring sits at the centre of
the large back room at Bogey's World, a cavernous pool hall littered
with big-screen TVs, in Montreal's Rosemont neighbourhood. The crowd is
here for an evening of flying headbutts and piledrivers hosted by the
International Wrestling Syndicate (IWS), a small but growing wrestling
company based in Montreal. The people who fill the front row of folding
wooden chairs race toward the ring and pound their fists on the canvas.
Back near the bar, all eyes are on Carol McAlear. She is petite not
quite five feet tall with blond hair and an easy, wide smile. Her sheer
black top offers a hint of her surgically enhanced chest. As three
tag-teams enter the ring for a six-man brawl, Carol glad-hands with
some of her fans. At one point she pulls down her top to flash the
group. A woman gamely grabs one of her breasts. They share a glance and
smile. Carol's husband and business partner their company, Wild Rose
Productions, owns half of the wrestling syndicate stands just a few
feet away, but he doesn't bat an eyelash. It's business, after all.
For the past nine years, Danny McAlear has been charging porn
enthusiasts up to $19.95 (all currency in U.S. dollars) a month to see
much more of his wife's anatomy, watching her disrobe and have sex with
hundreds of men and women on her porn site. Ever since he first posted
naked pictures of Carol (the mother of his three children) on a website
he created back in 1994, she's been known as Carol Cox, amateur porn
star, swinger and horny housewife.
Long-time swingers, the McAlears were looking for new couples to
socialize and have sex with. Along the way, they created a porn empire.
Today, carolcox.com is part of a network of sites that generate more
than $1 million a year.
Remarkably, in an industry where anyone can slap up a pay-for-porn
site, where customers rarely stay with one site for more than a month,
and where there's always someone younger and bustier popping up, the
McAlears have managed to take on all comers, adapt and succeed.
During an interview at the IWS show, Carol's outgoing, exhibitionist
side—the one you see on-line—disappears, replaced by a shy, giggling
suburban mom. She stares at the tape recorder and fidgets as she
struggles with each response.Danny, she says, usually does the talking. And what about her? She
motions toward her face with her fist to show she's more comfortable
using her mouth for purposes other than talking to reporters. But even
in semi-retirement, there's more to porn than being in bed. "We're not
just having sex all the time," she smiles. "It's adult, but it's also a
business."
The McAlears' business savvy has managed to keep Carol's eponymous
"amateur" site pumping out content for 9,000 happy customers, even as
the star herself has stepped back from performing full-time. With more
than a decade in the business and some 500 porn scenes under her belt,
Carol doesn't need the work any more, though she still does admin for
Wild Rose. Her husband, however, isn't ready to retire to the sailboat
he's always had his eye on. Along with his investment in the IWS (which
he says is in the five figures), McAlear recently launched a venture
he's betting will establish Wild Rose Productions as a juggernaut in
the burgeoning "adult lifestyles" niche—essentially it's a smorgasbord
for swingers—just as his wife's site did in the amateur porn category.
Wild Rose's story isn't about sex so much as it's about building
customer relationships, establishing a niche and outmarketing the
competition in a cutthroat business. It's also about taking a flyer on
new technologies to make a buck.
As it turns out, you can learn a lot from a pornographer.
When Danny McAlear steps out of his late-model purple Sebring
convertible, he looks the part of a porn mogul: a middle-aged guy with
a beer gut and a gaudy shirt, chest hair poking out the top. It's a
warm, cloudy fall afternoon in Pointe Claire, an affluent borough on
Montreal's West Island and home to Wild Rose's office. In his deep,
gruff voice, McAlear suggests we forgo the office tour—"It just looks
like a normal office"—and instead drives a couple of blocks to Cheers,
a neighbourhood bar.
In the early days of internet porn, McAlear would book the bar and
put out the call: Come party with Carol and me. It was a chance to meet
the horny housewife in person. "On the first Saturday night in 1996, we
had six people come out," says McAlear. Within a couple of months, they
were packing the place. Soon they had to move to a bigger bar, where
the McAlears' swinging friends (Montreal's swinging community is
reportedly thousands strong) would mingle with gawkers who spent their
free time on the internet, watching Carol have sex.
Wild Rose's strong early start is the reason McAlear says his site
now brings in $100,000-plus a month, compared with the $4,000 to $5,000
most amateur sites pull in. ("Amateur'' is the term the McAlears use to
describe women who aren't professional porn stars, but enjoy having sex
on camera and presumably love the cash they can pull in every month.)
As he hoovers his way through a pack of cigarettes, McAlear explains
how he went from working stiff to porn king. He was a mechanical
engineer at Bell Helicopter when he introduced his wife to porn fans
worldwide. Carol Cox was a hit, so the McAlears shot more photos and
started selling videos via mail order. In 1997, when the internet could
finally handle credit-card processing, they introduced a monthly
membership fee of $9.95 and began streaming videos—cutting-edge
technology that was largely being driven by the porn industry.
All the while, McAlear was still holding down a day job. "We turned
the pay site on in January, 1997," he says. "By February we were doing
over $30,000 in sales. In mid-March I quit Bell. I was losing money
going to work."
Carol "performed" four days a week to keep the content fresh and
members happy. McAlear staffed up and added more sites. Some were built
around a specific girl, like Carol's site. Others had a theme, like the
one called pornaudition.com, where aspiring starlets were put to the
test on camera by one of Wild Rose's resident stunt jocks.
Girls who fared well in the audition could then get work on
Wild Rose's other sites. To create the sites and drive new revenue, the
company hired more talent and built a system of webcam shows and chat
rooms to bring members closer to their favourite performers. This also
drove additional revenue. They weren't just sex-crazed, they were
tech-savvy. A year after turning on the pay site, visitors could ante
up $3.99 per minute to have a private chat with a girl via webcam and
instruct her to do whatever they wanted. At that time,
instant-messaging programs like ICQ were spreading to the mainstream.
Wild Rose's combination of instant video and chat was a highly advanced
offering, not to mention a lucrative new revenue stream.
The company also threw special pay-per-view events—like the time 50
guys and 11 girls had sex on camera, while customers watched the orgy
unfold live on their home PCs.
Leveraging technology to deliver better customer service and more
interaction was key to McAlear's success, and the success of the porn
industry as a whole (see "Tech's Untold Story," page 21). "We
introduced these things because the ability to interact with the girls
is critical in a niche like ours," says McAlear. "Now you can go in and
talk to a girl and she'll do things for you."
Customers could also give Wild Rose instant feedback on what they
liked and didn't like. If someone sent McAlear an e-mail requesting,
say, a space-sex fantasy replete with busty aliens and lonely
astronauts, Wild Rose could have it onscreen in a few weeks. In a
regular feature called Casting Couch, avid fans in the Montreal area
could even step inside the studio to shoot a scene with Carol Cox.
But the porn scene was changing. Sure, Wild Rose had its loyal band
of members, yet thousands of other sites were now competing for their
eyeballs. And just like every other business, McAlear was finding it
hard to keep up with producers overseas, who could pump out porn at
half the cost.
At the top of the on-line porn boom, in 1999, Wild Rose was
raking in more than $3 million a year. Its office and production
studios occupied a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in Pointe Claire. A
staff of 24 designers, video editors and marketers created websites,
videos and photos for the company's growing customer base:20,000
members, mostly from North America, were now paying $16.95 a month to
watch Carol and others have sex. McAlear even had a full-time carpenter
on staff to build elaborate sets. Carolcox.com was fast becoming one of
the most popular and lucrative adult websites in North America.
Membership fees alone accounted for 80% of Wild Rose's revenue, with
the rest coming from video sales, banner ads, chats and pay-per-view
events.
But Carol Cox was no longer the only housewife on the internet. In
1998, the U.S. Justice Department estimated there were roughly 28,000
porn sites. By 2001, it had found more than 280,000. It was hard to
hang on to existing members, and new ones were tough to sign up. People
would join a site for a month, then cancel their membership before
their credit card got dinged. Everyone was on the hunt for some new
fetish or niche. For McAlear, coming up with fresh concepts and keeping
members happy was a constant challenge. "It would drive me crazy
because we would develop something," he says, "and in a few months
everyone would be doing it."
By then, Carol was a 37-year-old mother of three two boys and
a girl, then ranging in age from 1 to 15, who wanted to ease her way
out of performing. That meant McAlear had to find a way to keep the
Carol Cox brand alive without its star act. He was also stuck with more
than 20 employees focused on producing original content, when the
forces of globalization meant he could buy "completed scenes"—15-minute
videos, plus a few hundred photographs taken during the shoot—from
countries like Russia and the Czech Republic for $1,000 or less,
instead of the $2,500 he was paying to produce them in-house.
But there was a problem: Buying content from overseas didn't allow
for the one-to-one marketing Wild Rose was known for. Russian models
couldn't fly to Montreal to attend a members-only party, nor were they
readily available for chats or to respond to member e-mails.
In 2002, McAlear took a drastic step: He downsized his digs, cut
down on original content and laid off all but five of his staff. The
video editors, web designers and set designers were gone. All of Wild
Rose's energy would now be focused on the amateur side of the business,
anchored by the original carolcox.com site. From there, McAlear would
give members access to more than 60 amateur sites that would make up
the Wild Rose Network.
At the time, a newcomer who wanted to set up a site would have to
compete with networks that offered hundreds of girls and a huge archive
of videos and photographs. The only way for individual performers to
compete was to band together and offer customers a wide selection of
sites, with frequently updated content, for a single fee.
McAlear had industry experience, constant traffic, a well-known
brand and a library of content that offered a strong foundation for his
new network. He recruited amateur performers from across North America
and built templates that slashed the amount of time it would take to
launch a new site. He also automated the process used to upload content
by designing a web-based back-end site, where the performers could log
in and post their new pictures and videos. Members got access to a huge
range of amateur sites, and McAlear got a steady stream of new content
without having to produce it himself. "We wanted real women, not paid
models," he says. "They have ownership, so they care about what they're
doing, and they'll talk to members on a webcam or in a chat."
Mina, a 34-year-old New Brunswick woman who joined the network
in September, came to Wild Rose after "reaching a plateau" with another
company. She says McAlear is better at retaining members than was her
previous network, and he offers more services to performers like her.
"There's no question about their integrity because they've been around
for so long," she says.
Mina says she fits into the "horny housewife" category, though she
also offers a bit of a goth image and "light fetishes"—things like
donning pantyhose or wearing glasses. She shoots her hard-core scenes
with her husband, Chaz, and also performs solo. She's been on-line
since 2001. Her goal is to bring in a minimum of $2,000 a month from
memberships and video sales, and she's getting close. To draw in new
customers, she's come up with a bonus offer: New members who sign up
for an annual subscription get their choice of an autographed 5x7
photograph or "one of my worn panties or thongs."
It's not all about the cash, though. Mina insists she and Chaz just
wanted to share their "incredible" sex life with others. "You have to
run in the red for several years, and it's conceivable to put in 70
hours a week for almost pennies during that time," she says. "Right now
I'm having a good time, and I'm boffing my husband for pay."
Nine thousand porn enthusiasts across North America now pay
to access carolcox.com and the Wild Rose Network. That's down
significantly from the high-water mark of 20,000, but it's still
impressive by today's standards, where many adult sites consider it a
major coup to hit 1,000 members. "The Network took the focus off us
making our own content," McAlear says. "It also helped that Carol was
going into semi-retirement, and her site was still too big and too
popular to shut down."
Today, one of Wild Rose's five employees manages the Network; the
rest manage Carol's site and the other Wild Rose products. McAlear has
also off-loaded responsibility for managing his interest in the
International Wrestling Syndicate so he can focus on his next project:
In June, 2005, Wild Rose flipped the switch on an on-line adult
community called the Adult Lifestyles Network. The backbone of the site
is the Adult Personals Network, where singles or couples chat with each
other via webcam or instant message, post videos of themselves on their
personal page, and organize and attend sex parties. One party, held
this past November at a private home in Montreal, drew about 30 people
many of whom ended up in bed together.
By late January, ALN had 12,000 members, though only about 500 were
paying the $24.95 monthly fee (to drive traffic, sign-up was free from
June to November). "This is something we're going to take slowly," says
McAlear. "We're not out just to be another personals site. We're trying
to develop a true adult community."
Wild Rose is venturing into a highly competitive market. Massive
adult-oriented networks like AdultFriendFinder, based in Palo Alto,
Calif., have been running for years. In fact, AFF is one of the 50 most
visited adult sites on the internet, with more than 22.3 million
members, many of whom pay $10 and up a month for extra content.
McAlear has one advantage, at least on his home turf: He and Carol
are minor celebrities. Their plan is to act as the official faces of
the ALN, showing up at parties to mix with members. So here they are at
Bogey's, home of the IWS. McAlear's getting twice the mileage out of
this appearance promoting the fledgling wrestling outfit and spreading
the word about his new adult network. As wrestlers with handles like
Marc Le Grizzly, Kid Kamikaze and Beef Wellington thrash it out in the
ring, Montreal's swinging supercouple are surrounded by close to 20 ALN
members, and they all want a piece of Carol Cox. She flirts and flashes
just enough to ensure they go looking for more on-line.
McAlear is hoping ALN will appeal to a much wider audience. "We're
looking at ways of going into more mainstream marketing with ALN
because it's not porn it's adult," he says, noting there's a difference
between producing sex content and creating a website where sexually
active adults can meet and interact with each other—which is why he and
Carol first started posting naked photos on-line in the first place.
"There are a lot of grey areas, and I don't know what will happen,"
says Montreal's porn king. "We're going to make money; it's just a
question of how much and how well."
TECH'S UNTOLD STORY
Video may have killed the radio star, but it created the porn star.
When the VHS video was released in 1976, the adult industry was the
first to recognize its potential and drive acceptance of the format.
Think Boogie Nights—Burt Reynolds's porn-producing character loses his empire when he bucks the industry trend and sticks with celluloid.
VHS wasn't the only technology to be quickly co-opted and championed
by the porn industry. "As it stands now, new technology is probably
sexualized in the first 10 minutes of its development," said Michael
Storch, a professor in McGill's faculty of religious studies, in an
October, 2005, interview. The first pay-TV channels relied heavily on
porn for profits, as did (and do) hotel pay-TV offerings. The adult
industry was also among the first to monetize the internet through mail
order, and then via monthly memberships paid by credit card. The trend
continues. Some $400 million was spent worldwide on mobile-phone porn
in 2004, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm in Boston,
and it predicts the mobile porn market will be worth $5 billion by 2010.
Many of today's most commonly used and valuable internet
applications were either invented or perfected by the adult industry.
It was instrumental in driving the introduction of on-line credit-card
processing, improving video streaming and perfecting the compression of
images for on-line viewing. Porn-site operators introduced webcams and
private chats long before they made their way to the average desktop.
When DVDs and digital video cameras hit the market, pornographers were
the first to jump on board. "If it wasn't for the adult market," says
McAlear, "live and streaming video wouldn't have developed as fast as
it did."
Welcome
Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
I write weekly columns for Hour and Columbia Journalism Review online, and am a former columnist and blogger for The Globe And Mail. Read my bio by clicking on the "About Me" link above, or check out the "Writing Samples" page to read some of my work. If you're interested in speaking with me about an assignment or project, email me at the address listed below.
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