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.

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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