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I sometimes find it interesting that so many of us are out there looking for guidance, looking for help ... looking for assistance to achieve our goals and yet so often we fail to find what we're looking for. It seems that if something isn't clearly labeled as a tutorial or a 'how-to ...' article we don't find the help or guidance we need. Yet there are plenty of lessons out there ... all we have to do is keep our eyes open and be prepared to learn from the experience of others.

And that's one of the keys to success online. Sure we can go hunting for tutorials, we can seek advice on message boards and we can track down every how-to article that was ever written but we can still miss the most important lessons. We can miss those lessons because quite often they're not folded neatly into a tutorial and they aren't encapsulated in a tidy how-to article set out in easy to read point form.

Instead you'll find them mentioned in a variety of different places over a period of time. You might find a snippet in an industry newsletter, a brief paragraph in a press release or a quote from the CEO of a company. You might find more in the musings of an industry pundit or in the comments section of a blog. Disgruntled users can complain on a message board and even newspapers might touch on it an unrelated article that might not appear online.

You see, the best lessons you need to learn are those that are happening right now. If you want to be on the cutting edge of any online industry you need to know now ... not next week, not next month and certainly not next year. Sure, you could be learning the important lessons then and that's when you will find them in tutorials and those wonderful how-to articles ... but if you want to learn the lessons in time to make money from what you have discovered then you need to be learning them right now.

Start as you mean to finish is one lesson that people are learning right now about the world of Web 2.0. Social media is big right now and there are some important lessons being taught right now. They certainly don't come in tutorials but they are clearly visible if you care to watch the way things are developing.

People involved in social media are learning that they have the modern day equivalent of Pandora's Box in their hands and once they open it they're never going to have the same control over the contents that they had while it was closed.

YouTube, Digg and Facebook have all discovered that once you give control of your media to the masses they're never going to let you take it back so the limits you set right at the beginning are the ones you're going to have to stick to and you will never be able to more narrowly re-define those limits in the future.

YouTube found great favor with the general Web population because of what they offered and how they allowed users to interact with their content. On YouTube surfers are able to browse videos by categories and easily see which videos were viewed and discussed most often and user ratings are clearly identified too.

Last week YouTube decided to 'upgrade' their site and more prominently feature videos that were recommended by editors and no longer clearly show what the users liked. Now we all know what that means - it's just spin for 'let's feature those videos that might make us money' ... and that's understandable. But it was too late, Pandora's Box was open and the people had been given a taste of being in control and they didn't like losing that control.

It only took about a week before YouTube woke up to the fact that there are parts of their business that they no longer control. Of course YouTube made a variety of excuses for trying to remove the user-rated listings but the end result was inevitable ... the user-rated listings are back and the users remain in control.

And that's a lesson for us even here in adult. Once you give your users even a sniff of control over part of your online empire don't ever try and take it back. The users like having control, they want to retain control and no amount of spin will convince them that losing control will be good for them.

So the lesson for us is that if you try to take back control the people who use your site will surely punish you and for adult site owners that means a very unpleasant hit in the pocket and that is definitely not something any of us want to experience.