How do publishers go after male eyeballs? Here are two examples. “Playboy magazine … is tapping into the Internet for a “Girls of MySpace” photo spread,” reports Media Post. The layout will be done at what Media Post calls “at a dicey time” for MySpace, referring to the “14-year-old New Jersey girl, Judy Cajuste, (who) was alllegedly murdered by a man in his 20s who met her through the site,” and a dropoff in advertising.

And in a (hormonally-) related development, Paid Content notes that Time Inc. is nearing the launch of a site called Office Pirates that “hopes to recreate that fabled male locker-room atmosphere of Wall Street.” The Paid Content item is sourced to a Wall Street Journal piece that says Office Pirates is being designed by “Mark Golin, the editor credited with making Maxim magazine a major success in the late 1990s with its beer-and-babes formula imported from the U.K.”

Hardy Har Har, Not Big companies sponsor training classes to discourage sexual innuendo at the office if for no other reasons than to defend themselves against the possibility that a sexual discrimination lawsuit might implicate the company for allowing a pattern of behavior to develop. So if guys leer at sites at the office, how does that square with corporate policy?

In addition to concerns about harrassment, there’s also the issue of time wasted. How much browsing gets done at the office? If there’s a study on this I haven’t seen it. A BBC special said“nearly half of office workers admit to spending more than three hours a week surfing the internet at work for their own pleasure.” Although that’s anecdotal, it squares with bits and pieces of what I see and hear. Web browsing and shopping at work may be carrying Web 2.0 and whether for reasons of producitivity loss or legal exposure companies may take steps to force that behavior into the off hours where it belongs. That will put new media to the test.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media