• Mark Dery is right when he says you had to be there.


• His opening presentation included an impressive Hokusai print of a woman being pleasured by an octopus, which stood out as the only image where a female seemed to be having any pleasure at all


• Paul Mathias stated that porn invariably involves risk: the risk you might find out something unexpected about yourself


• Barbara de Genevieve showed her baffling, spectacularly energetic transgender sex videos that left many in the audience breathless - I for sure was one of them. The speaker herself had to pause her talk a few times to proudly admire what was going on on the screen behind her - with good reason


• Mireille Miller-Jones talked about the subtle, positive change of tone in sex sites of black women who manage to take control over their careers - one of them, Sinnamon, claims her status as a 'high-class courtisan and afro-geek'


• I spoke about my experimental free-for-all (now no more) nakedness on Flickr. The talk generated a number of positive remarks and conversations. These came almost exclusively from men, and none were spoken publicly: people approached me individually, afterwards, during the several breaks


• Ms. Miller-Jones, on the other hand, commented right away about my preference for the word 'naked' instead of 'nude', pointing out that black people's bodies have always, historically been seen as naked: their right to being nude something yet to be conquered


• Mikita Brottman's talk brought up a discussion about the myth of shocking images being 'imprinted' or 'burned' into our brains - images that might change the viewer forever. No one seemed to know of plausible research that could prove or disprove that myth


• Sergio Messina commented on a long stream of his 'real core' images collected from usenet groups ranging from corduroy fetish to everything you can or cannot imagine


• Some topics were barely discussed, to my disappointment: the impact of USA laws on worldwide distribution of content, distinctions between commercial and not-for-profit production, the fetishization of the 'real'. Next time?


• The closing party with a live, gooey performance by Adam Zaretsky & Barbara Groves and the cuddly Italian bears of Phag Off will not be forgotten.

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There used to be all those talk shows back in the '50s and '60s, when I was on television a great deal. People would talk about many important things, and you had some very good talkers. They're not allowed on now. Or they're set loose in the Fox Zoo, in which you have a number of people who pretend to be journalists but are really like animals. Each one has his own noise--there's the donkey who brays, there's the pig who squeals. Each one is a different animal in a zoo, making a characteristic noise. The result is chaos, which is what is intended. They don't want the people to know anything, and the people don't."