I am Boing Boing!

A link from Gawker - that is, from Nick Douglas’ admirably snarky but essentially erroneous take on the Boing Boing/Violet Blue kerfluffle - provided me with food for thought. That, and high-order entertainment that almost made me forget my soul-crushing job! The setup in a nutshell from BB moderator Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

Boing Boing has been caught in the middle of a real internet shitstorm and pile-on over the last few days. A blogger named Violet Blue noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her. Some people wanted to know why.

Bottom line is that those posts (not “more than 100 posts,” as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.

We hope you’ll respect our choice to keep the reasons behind this private. We do understand the confusion this caused for some, especially since we fight hard for openness and transparency. We were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved.

Clearly, that didn’t work out.

Clearly! The fallout has spread far and wide indeed, as the existence of this post attests. The overwrought anguish of the gazillion comments (many of them, at least) attached to Hayden’s post rises like a cry to the heavens, demanding…well, that the moderators feel really, really bad about deleting their own material and exercising their right to associate - or not - with whomever they choose.

Still, it’s a ill wind indeed that blows no good at all. I have browsed Boing Boing rather infrequently, but today has convinced me to do it much more often. In fact, I’ve just added the site to my rotating, feed-based blogroll (full list here). Aye, I stand with Boing Boing!

Boing Boing, you are a madman. When you stole that cow…and your friends tried to make it with the cow… I want to party with you, cowboy. The two of us together, forget it.

Any blog that can inspire umpty-billion references to Orwell sounds like a blog I need to get to know.

A guide to the perplexed - and to Nick Douglas - can be found in Glenn Fleishman’s comment in the thread without end:

There’s this incredible confusion on the Net about personal space and personal control. BoingBoing is not the government. BB didn’t delete Violet Blue’s Web site. They didn’t incite people to hate her. They didn’t even comment on the matter. They had some kind of personal or professional disagreement or made a decision about her for personal or professional reasons and chose not to share it.

They did not: remove her words; deny her income; fire her; attempt to get others to fire her; attempt to get her hosting company to drop her site; attempt to disparage her.

The point missed in nearly all the comments to date is that BB has a very very long tail, no sexual innuendo intended. When they point to something, it’s a firehose. Even years later, it can be a garden hose. In this ostensibly rare case, they decided that their bully pulpit of endorsing by referral and aiding traffic by referral no longer met their personal or editorial test.

Why would anyone reasonably argue with that?

Just for that bit of rationality, I’ve added Fleishman’s blog to the roll as well. See? Two positive outcomes!

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