[mstade]

I too thought I was going crazy when I noticed it this morning... Funny, but that shade (or one very much like it) is forever etched into my brain as "porn blue" thanks to a k10k issue back in the day when the internet was still referred to as the information super highway and nobody knew what we were doing. Here's an excerpt from the first "lesson":

    You must never use this colour.
    You can like it as much as you want.
    You can buy a dress in this colour for your girlfriend.
    Your mum might have it as the colour of her eyes.
    Feel free to paint your house like it.
    But never use it on a website. Never.
    This colour is the porn colour. 
    You must never copy the porncolours.

Source thanks to Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20050404141942/http://www.k10k.ne...

Still cracks me up.

EDIT: for those who have no idea what k10k was, here's the story: http://www.cubancouncil.com/work/project/kaliber-10000

[sushisource]

Oh man I forgot about K10k. Was an amazing site.

[xsmasher]

AKA "Blueprint blue," source of the term "blue movie" and "working blue."

[laumars]

2005 wasn't that long ago. I thought the press stopped using the term "information super highway" in the 90s. But in case thanks for share that, it was an amusing read.

[mstade]

I think that particular issue is older though, I'd guess 1999 or 2000. If I recall correctly people were still going on about the information super highway around that time, along with very literal illustrations of "surfing the web." 2005 is just when the snapshot is from I think.

[0xADADA]

What is the porn color? I don't understand the reference. What makes it "the porn color"?

Aren't links blue (#0000ff) by default?

[mstade]

I believe that's the reference right there. Porn sites, along with most other sites, were usually not quite as spiffy as they are these days. Aside from some creative hot spots that really overdid it with the GIFs (geocities 4 life!) most sites were typically just browser defaults with perhaps some changes to background colors, maybe add a nifty tiled background image and such. Web design (not to mention development) was quite different back in the late nineties, early naughts, than what it's like now – the default blue link color was everywhere.

This whole issue is effectively a sarcastic response to that lack of design, and referring to the default blue as "the porn color" I read to mean "don't be cheap and stick with the defaults; don't be a porn site."

The joke doesn't age very well, but it was really funny back then.

[xsmasher]

It's "blueprint blue" - a reference to the cheap printing process used to make the posters for pornographic films, and also the reason they got the nickname "blue movies."

[mstade]

Today I learned – thanks!

[semi-extrinsic]

From the above Internet Archive link, looks like the color is #0033FF.