SubscribeLet me propose a radical notion: The weblog's greatest strength — its uncensored, unmediated, uncontrolled voice — is also its greatest weakness.Wow, that's deep. It's like that with the Hulk—his unslaked thirst for retribution gives him great power, including the power to SMASH!!!—but it also gets him into trouble.
You can talk, you can talk
You can bicker, you can talk
You can bicker, bicker, bicker
You can talk, you can talk
You can talk, talk, talk, talk,
Bicker, bicker, bicker
You can talk all you want
But it's different then it was
No it ain't, no it ain't
But you gotta know the territory
I can't help but think this every time I read Ms. Blue's articles: for a sex writer she is such a prude. It's like they hired Tipper Gore to write a sex column. The only thing about this writer that's "edgy" is the picture of herself that she attaches to the columns.
ooa eoa i a oe eeie."consonant-removal is ____ more eerie"?
Last year, boingboing wrote about the Society of American Archivists decision to delete their old listserv archives. They generated enough attention that the decision was reversed and the archives were preserved. If they're erasing parts of their own archive for any reason, it's an act of shocking hypocrisy. If they're deliberately scrubbing specific people from their archives, it's a disgusting reversal of all their publicly stated principles.
There are a multitude of problems with the rationale behind your argument, Patrick, assuming it's what most people are interpreting it as, regarding Boing Boing's removal of Violet Blue's posts:
Persons who are against political censorship and corporate malfeasance are not for that reason obliged to live their entire personal and professional lives in a goldfish bowl.
The vast majority of commenters on this article not speaking about obligation, i.e., most everyone recognizes that Boing Boing has no obligational requirement foisted upon it. They are speaking about hypocritism as it relates to morality. In short, if you consistently advocate against censorship and for openness and transparency, to engage in clandestine editing of your past (especially when you have specifically argued for the maintenance of archives, i.e. last year's archivsts listserv story) is hypocritical and as such is morally wrong. I do not need to know the intimate secrets of Cory, Mark, Xeni, David, or Teresa. I do expect that if they stand up and say, "An organization should be run in such-and-such a way," that they run their organization in accordance with those same principles.
Believing that public utilities ought to be accountable to the public does not make one into a public utility, no matter how hard anyone tries to spin it that way.
Boing Boing has consistently advocated for private agencies and companies to be accountable to certain things it felt to be morally good, i.e., transparency, openness, and not disappearing things in the middle of the night. As said above, few are saying that BoingBoing is a public utility that is legally required and obligated to keep its archives untouched. If that's all you're arguing, you're merely saying a statement most people already agree with. What the vast majority of the extant criticism is about is that the action of "disappearing" Violet Blue's posts from the archive with no transparency, notice, or openness is an action directly contrary to several principles BoingBoing has routinely advocated and epsoused over the years, and as such is a highly hypocritical action that deserves scorn.
Advocating “transparency” for government proceedings, or for the beneficiaries of chartered monopolies and public largesse, doesn’t oblige the advocate to be “transparent” in every personal or artistic decision they themselves make.
Again, a substitution of a straw man for the real argument. Boing Boing has not, over its past, solely attacked governments, "chartered monopolies," and "beneficiaries of ... public largesse". They've criticized authors, leaders of professional organizations (SFWA, etc.), non-monopoly companies (Apple and MS are big but each is not a monopoly, especially given Apple's relatively small market share), and many others.
Boing Boing has, over the years, earned a great deal of respect, supportive cheers, and agreement for its actions of criticizing all — not a strictly limited subset of individuals legally obligated not to practice censorship, but all — of those who would be opaque and censorious and practice actions that alter records in the dead of night. Yet they themselves are, when it is convenient for them, being opaque and censorious and altering records in the dead of night.
They may not have any legal requirement that they not do what they're doing, but to suggest that what they're doing is not laughably hypocritical nor morally wrong is a highly difficult argument to make, and you've made nowhere near a convincing case here.
Even weirder is the idea that companies shouldn't be criticized because in a market, you should just take your business elsewhere. Free markets thrive on good information. For a market to function, customers need to have good information about which goods are worth buying and which ones should be avoided -- that's why we complain in public, to help companies make better decisions.This is from the clip that he posted to Boing Boing. At the very least, they're lying in a bed they've made themselves.
"I’ve been racking my brain thinking of what issues I might’ve come down on the wrong side of," Blue told me on the phone. "There’s been no argument, there's been no disagreement, no flame war, none of the usual things."I think she rejected Cory's advances one too many times.
David Bilek@51: "Xopher: okay, how about when BB criticized Digg for pulling down the AACS key in response to DMCA notices? Digg was "disappearing" any post referencing the AACS key in much the same way that BB has "disappeared" any posts referencing V.B."BB never ever criticized Digg for doing this. You're making stuff up.
Oh Cory...
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/05/02/digg-users-revolt-ov.html
Wait, how is that horrid? I was be hyperbolic that Cory writes too many posts about every little L.B. reading event or trivial news item.Metafilter: in 2008 it reads like someone's fantasy of 2002.
But they have engaged in an act that a significant amount of their readership reads as hypocritical and a violation of the spirit of transparency that they have espoused for quite a while. This story is tearing through the interwebs. It strikes me as a collossal tactical bluder to not address it publicly
Someone is censoring incoming forum posts in real time, and went back and removed the rainbow post once they got the joke. That goes beyond "we need to have a conference call before we respond to this". -- LeonNooo!! that was awesome!
Wow. There is no way in hell I'm going to wade through all the comments here, but I just would like to note that 425 comments is pretty close to the number of comments left on the 9/11 thread. I find it fascinating.And we only have like 5 times the users now!
I can think of a lot of reasons I might decide to delete a bunch of old posts having to do with a person I was previously friendly with, and who has since behaved in a manner that made me want to have nothing to do with them. I can even imagine being in situations where I was somewhat enjoined, by legal advice, common sense, or even my own emotional limitations, from wanting to talk about it.That's a pretty early comment so you've probably all read it already. But it would not be incorrect to say that this reads more easily as a description of an interpersonal problem than of a legal or corporate problem. His continued arguments down the line of "this is a personal blog" corroborate this interpretation. Extrapolating from this, the two comments in ML, and what I know of BB, I think that their silence on the matter is the result of a disagreement between two or more of the BB editors. I would further guess that the Violet Blue thing is more of a symptom than a cause. The fact that they're still posting means nothing, of course -- blogs can have arbitrary numbers of posts enqueued to be posted later.
If there be a means to RSS-feed BB while excluding all theHere you go:
self-congratulatory crap/steampunk'ry/bad art on the theme of dewy-eyed girls/bugs/animals/unicorns... I'd like to find it.
tail -f /dev/nullplagiarist!mttn s th sncrst frm f flttr.
Metafilter: my beloved blue swarm of snark.Perhaps I should add it to my profile or something?
I hear BoingBoing is trying to clean up its act to sweeten up a buyout deal with Disney. Think of it... BoingBoing buying Disney. Yeah.See, if you put it in quotes it's like somebody else said it first! (I learned that technique from Drudge.)
posted by ardgedee at 10:02 AM on June 30, 2008