Life on The EdgeXD

When I was a kid shopping with my mom I used to pull the tags off the clothes on the racks at Macy’s.
This is your introduction to my tagging database blog? An expose of your dysfunctional and delinquent childhood?

I’m just saying… I don’t understand how you put a “tag” on a video.
It’s not a physical object, it’s metadata: “data about the data.” In this case, the original datum is the digital video file – the porn clip. The metadata describes the clip.

I liked that you said “datum.”
Three years of high school Latin, it can’t be helped.

What can you track in a porn clip? The names of the performers?
If the clip features top-drawer performers, such as Lux Kassidy or Heather Vandeven or Sunny Leone, sure. But in a business that boasts a new generation of stars every eighteen months, we’ve found that viewers are more interested in the “whats” and “wheres” and “how manys” than they are in the “whos.” So that’s what we give them.

So how does it work?
Our taggers, people with a skill-sets and sensibilities entirely different from their Macy’s counterparts, screen every clip and note everything worth noting. Woman’s hair color, breast size, what she is wearing (for however briefly), what acts are being performed, and where, et cetera. The taggers embed this information into the actual timeline of the video, and that data is entered into the search engine database that powers the entire site.

So if wanted to find, say, a large-nippled buxom red-head in a latex nurse’s uniform giving a blow-job, your guys are tracking that…?
You’re scaring me, but yes. And you illustrate a fundamental point: what makes for a good sex video, it should come as no surprise, is a highly personal subject. Sexual fantasies may in fact be the ultimate niche market. That’s exactly the business we’re in, and that’s exactly where the competition falls short. People can subscribe to “all Asian” or “all barely legal” or “all MILF” sites all day long, but these categorizations are still too broad. With our search capabilities, fed by the copious data and minutiae which our taggers track, EdgeXD subscribers can fine-tune their fantasies. More fun still, they can broaden their sexual horizons in a gradual and informed way, similar to the way music lovers have been using Last.fm and Pandora.com to expand their musical horizons. What EdgeXD offers is Discovery.

A lot of sites now incorporate widgets and code from Google and Yahoo. Is this what powers Edge’s search?
EdgeXD’s tagging mechanism and search engine is all custom designed and made, built from the ground up by our developers in a secret laboratory in Prague.

Really?
Well, it’s more like a detached garage owned by the father of our senior developer, but they’ve covered the walls with those mock blueprints of the spaceships in Star Wars to make it look like a secret laboratory. We don’t pay them a lot so it’s in our best interest to humor them.