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A 5AM impulse I had alone in my apartment while working and killing time on a webmaster bulletin board, had, less than 48 hours later, become a movement. Its name “impoverished noobs“. It’s aim: to harness the enthusiasm of young, talented (but largely ignored) porn industry hopefuls and use it to effect desperately needed reform within a legally imperiled industry. The effects? We shall see…

I, for one, was certainly stunned to discover what effect a few lines typed in the middle of the night could have — on the author of those words, on the people reading them, on an entire industry, and perhaps even beyond that.

For those of you thinking very intensely these days about business communications, public relations and professional reputation management (especially given the advent of the blog), my experience will prove instructive. The sharpest among you have already appreciated that the Web is not just completely different from any other medium before it, but also that it is quite a bit more different than we have even recently thought.

Blog is big.

If I have any aptitude for it, I learned it in porn. And that’s not because they are big bloggers. In fact they’re not. But something that is true in porn, and that has been true for a number of years, is only now dawning on the majority of online professionals. Porn Biz People are very well acquainted with having both enormous sums of money, and a highly visible public persona online and at risk, every business day.

Communications professionals would marvel that there had been even one moment in an entire career when a few keystrokes meant millions of dollars. In porn, that’s a common daily occurrence, and not just for owners and CEOs. In fact, a great deal is in the hands of the least experienced in this field. Notwithstanding early retirement, senior people tend to grow less visible, more discreet with experience. But, since the business demands a “presence” in such places as adult webmaster boards, someone has got to do it — every day.

A few days after the sudden and phenomenonal event that was impoverishedNOOBS, which incidentally could not have happened in any other industry or on any other board, I was on gofuckyourself.com fighting for my life.

Of course, every great story must have a heaping dose of drama.

Though I made many new friends when I stood up and started saying all the things I did about the porn biz publicly, you can understand that there were also others, who were — shall we say — rather invested in the status quo.

And they were circling all around all the time, if in the shadows.

Everyone, fans and detractors, is watching all the time. I type knowing that my friends and my enemies will linger over every word. And, though it is all virtual, fortunes are being lost and made.

I was asked why I thought I had any right to teach anybody anything, how successful I was, and what was in it for me.