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Form over Function?

Ego_leather

I'm a geek. There, I said it. Different forms of technology clutter my briefcase as well as my nightstand drawer; I'm constantly on the quest for the latest technology to make my life easier. But even among my geek counterparts, I am a member of a sub-set of electronic hoarders: the style-conscious gadget geek.

If you want to spot one of my sub-species, look through airport lounges for anyone carrying a super-slim MacBook Air. Although it's lightweight (there are other sub-notebooks that are lighter) and powerful, its true allure is sleekness and beauty. As Metrotechtuals will tell you, there's a shortage of computing accessories that will satisfy a style/function test.

Iomega recently released its luxury line of portable hard-drives for the "high-fashion mobile user." I've been using the eGo leather-wrapped 250 Gigabyte portable drive ($122.95) on a recent business road-trip. At nearly a half-pound and 3.5"x 5.25" x .75" the eGo Leather is noticeably larger and heavier than my current portable, the LaCie Little Disk. Out of the box, however, the leather-wrapped eGo provides instant tactile allure. With brown leather surrounding the gently curved device, the eGo looks remarkably like a traditional hip-flask sans screw-cap. As I connect the device to my MacBook Air on my space-challenged airline tray table, I appreciate the device's style, but it does appear to clash like a stately leather wing-back chair in an ultramodern New York penthouse. I think, however, that Iomega is going down the right track with executive-look storage device; in fact a storage device designed specifically to match the aesthetic of the MacBook Air (the eGo Helium) will be released soon.

Testing the device, it functions on-par with other portable drive. Iomega also includes the Drop Guard, which protects your data caused by shock to the device. I dropped my drive from the rated 51" drop height onto concrete and was relieved to have it survive unscathed.

Bottom Line: If you identify more with a leather club chair than with an Eames, or are prone to dropping things, then this hard-drive may be for you.

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September 25, 2008

The End of Porn?

Pornosite

This topic seems as good as any to kick off MV Tech, my new blog for Men's Vogue. I'll be covering gadgets and Web news, as well as reporting on Internet data that provides insight into our online and offline worlds.

Of course, porn is legitimately in the news: Mozilla -- like its competitors Safari, Internet Explorer 8, and Google Chrome -- has just announced that it will give users the option of a "private mode" (known colloquially as "porn mode") in Firefox 3.1. Which means that it will not collect your history or cookies; users can open and browse in a separate window without worrying about what kind of trail they'll be leaving behind.

That begs the question: Does porn really need the help? You'd be surprised. It seems as though other kinds of browsing might be eating away at the naughty Web giant.

Over the last three years, visits to porn sites have experienced a precipitous fall. They've been mysteriously buoyed this summer -- possibly caused by poor economic conditions (some even postulate that the Tax Stimulus Program has stimulated more than the economy). At the same time, social networking, as a category of sites, has shown signs of becoming an addictive activity (friend-adds, pokes, virtual beers, to name a few), with numbers that continue to rise.

We only have so many hours in the day. That's my theory as to why we're seeing a negative correlation -- or a trade-off -- between visits to adult entertainment sites when compared to visits to social networks such as MySpace or Facebook. In my new book Click: What Millions of People do Online and Why it Matters, I discuss this fascinating trade-off between two very different categories of Internet use. Here's an updated chart comparing the face-off between the two categories.

Hitwise_2

But there's an interesting data-bit that might shed some light on the trade-off between networking and porn: While MySpace and Facebook have been attracting 18-24 year-olds in droves, that same age demographic has been leaving the porn category in droves.

Maybe younger Internet users are spending so much time online exploring friends' profile pages that they're left with no time to look at porn. Or maybe they're already being so titillated that they don't need to.

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September 16, 2008
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