Incongruously, the forward-thinking, free-culture-touting blog BoingBoing has apparently deleted from its giant archives more than 100 posts related to, written by or containing the name of Violet Blue, the San Francisco Chronicle sex columnist, contributor to Gawker's Fleshbot, and otherwise prolific writer about the nasty.
No one, including Blue herself, has any idea what's behind the scrubbing. BoingBoing has been conspicuously silent; despite considerable confusion in the blogopshere, the site has not posted about the issue or said they planned to. Blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer Xeni Jardin did not respond to an e-mail from me, and several other bloggers and writers reported non-answers too.
Almost all of the deleted blog entries, according to Blue, were posted not by her but by BoingBoing writers highlighting and linking to herwork. (Here's an example of a scrubbed post, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.) Blue said that none of the her-related posts were particularly scandalous, illegal, or "disgusting." Not all were even about sex. The one post Blue did write herself — also deleted — was edited by Jardin before publication.
"I’ve been wracking 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."
So she didn't kick BoingBoing writer Cory Doctorow's dog — there goes my theory. Any other possibilities?
"I haven’t blogged positively about anyone they hate. I haven’t decided that DRM is awesome. I’m not totally pro-AT&T wiretapping. I’m just trying to figure it out," Blue said. "If there’s an issue they have with me, they haven’t told me. If it's someone I've made friends with that they don't like, no one's said, 'Hey, this person's really hurt us, and we're no longer comfortable associating with you.' Or whatever. I'm just making it up as I go here."
It's bizarre that BoingBoing has failed to take any steps to clarify the situation.
For one thing, post-snuffing is usually "a serious no-no," said Eve Batey, Blue's friend and Chronicle editor. "That's just against the rules of the blog world."
But there's also the fact that BoingBoing has often presented itself as a stalwart of cultural openness. Doctorow himself is a well-known copyfighter — a crusader against restrictive intellectual property laws. He has removed a post at least once before — when writer Ursula K. Le Guin asked that an excerpt of her book be taken down — but he immediately wrote a long, apologetic explanation of the incident.
In the case of Violet Blue, no such explanation has been offered, and at least one person has claimed that a comment he left on BoingBoing regarding the issue was "quietly censored."
Given that there is no apparent ill will, that the Blue posts were not illegal or obscene, and that BoingBoing has plenty of other sex-related posts that it hasn't removed, this situation will remain inexplicable until the BB crew feels like cluing us in.
Meanwhile, rumors go undisputed — free to fuel plenty of conspiracy theories and speculation about BoingBoing's intent.
top photo courtesy of Violet Blue used with permission, bottom photo of Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue in better days by justin via flickr
This weekend, Joss Whedon dropped some details about his online spectacular "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog." The first of three installments will debut on July 15, the second on the July 17, and the third on the July 19. All three will be removed at midnight on July 20. (Thanks, Whedonesque).
Whedon also added a few notes about the origin of the series. Here's an excerpt:
Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.
Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A super-villain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.
For people interested in early details of YouTube history and some insight and color from its co-founder, Chad Hurley, check out this video from Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee. Hurley gave a speech at the Startup2Startup dinner last week, and talked about the founding of the site, how it initially had 8 people working on it for free out of a room at Sequoia, and how baby YouTube quickly started getting and serving more videos than it had ever expected to. Nice job, Liz.
Regarding your blog on "Hot Trends watch: Air Force portal," there were 62,547 active-duty airmen eligible for promotion to technical or master sergeant during the 2008 promotion cycle. 12,514 were selected for promotion. In addition, you would probably want to factor in the eligible airman's co-workers and supervisor, who are usually searching for promotees’ names as well.
This is a good clue to help us with our Hot Trends ballparking. I'm going out on a limb to say 50% of promotion-eligible airmen checked in to see if they were promoted. And if you add a few thousand family members, you're looking at roughly 35,000 searches. Once again, this is just a guess. I've asked Master Sgt. Bailey to send along some numbers for traffic to the Air Force site so we can further investigate how many people we're talking about here.
Got a troublesome neighbor? You are not alone. RottenNeighbor.com, a site where users can sound-off about local area residents whom they're not too happy with, was a hot Google search this morning, clocking in at No. 7 and 12 on the Hot list.
Rotten Neighbor, launched last summer, lets you search by city or ZIP code for all the noisy, annoying and rude neighbors listed in your area. For any given ZIP code, you can get more specific breakdowns of rude metrics, such as noise, safety and appearance.
Individual neighbor reports list the general vicinity of the culprits, a description of the complaint and the number of other users that agreed. In addition to text grievances, you can post videos and photos of ne'er-do-wells caught in the act. The map also displays such neighborhood party poopers as registered sex offenders and foreclosed homes.
The site also lets you log reports for good neighbors, which appear in green on the map. However, there aren't yet many commendations listed in Los Angeles (besides the Cunninghams -- great people). A utility for praising your neighbors somehow doesn't seem quite as useful.
The sudden increased traffic to Rotten Neighbor seems to be taking its toll on the site's servers, causing slow page loads and sometimes error messages. People checking to see if friends, family members or they themselves made the list may have to wait until the stampede dies down.
In a story with the excellent headline "Internet body approves domain name big bang," Agence France-Press reports that ICANN, the Internet naming authority, will now allow an essentially unlimited number of Internet addresses to be created and registered.
From UniqueAuction's iPhone auction. Good luck finding a winning bid.
UniqueAuction.com has a great hook: Instead of traditional bidding, where you'd actually put up the amount of money you think an item is worth, here you can win just by bidding a price that no one else has bid.
Moreover, every item on the site is discounted to 1% of its retail price, so if you want to get a 3G iPhone, the most you could possibly pay is $1.99 -- and if your unique bid is just $0.07, then that's all you pay!
And all you have to do is bid a dollar figure that no one else has bid! It's sounds so easy, Bob, there's just got to be a catch!
That's right, there is.
First of all, UniqueAuction lets you see all the bids that have been submitted so far. So for the current iPhone that's up for sale, every number from $0.01 to $1.99 has already been picked--meaning there are no more unique bids available. When all the numbers are taken, the site awards the item to the first submitter of the highest bid with the smallest number of duplicates. So if only 3 people bid $0.25, and every other number had 4 bidders, the first person to have bid $0.25 wins. So if you wanted to bid on the iPhone now, there's no way you could win.
The only chance you have is getting in the auction early to stake out one of the numbers before they're all taken. But even if you nab the 7 cent bid before anyone else, your odds of winning are still esentially one in two hundred -- meaning you'd have to participate in 200 auctions before you ever won anything. Does that sound like it's worth your time?
Meanwhile, the site can make a pretty penny charging bidding fees on expensive items (it costs $2 to bid on the TV, $20 to bid on the house), and ring in a trillion page views from bidders incessantly checking to see if they've won, and searching for new items to bid on when they find out they didn't. Giving away an iPhone or two -- or even a cheap house -- is certainly a small price for luring hordes of people with the (fat) chance of a great deal.
Still and all, I think I have a pretty good shot at getting GTA4 for 43 cents...
One would think that a new entrant into this stickily saturated field would want to distinguish itself immediately with some stunning new feature, angle or technology. But Atom is substantially similar to all other comedy sites, both in appearance and in content.
Granted, I did not watch all 20,000 videos the site has available. I watched only a few, and that's because every one I looked at contained at least a 10-second pre-roll ad. I had to swallow the same 30-second Twix commercial three times and an ad for Verizon wireless the other seven. And this was all in the space of about five minutes. I can't think of a site that makes you watch a commercial before every single video, let alone the same two ads over and over.
Ad blasting at that level verily screams at viewers not to come back -- and, worse, it makes the site look desperate for cash. Which we all are, because this is the Internet, but it's not necessarily the best first and repeated impression.
Still, perhaps we can chalk it up to a launch-time glitch or a bit of overeagerness on the part of Atom's ad sales team. The channel also has a set of six original Web comedies from Comedy Central, which I will watch as soon as the image of the Verizon phone fades from my retinas.
The online release ensures, the Air Force said, "timely worldwide access to all Airmen and their families."
Though this is not the most mind-boggling news in the world, the number 12,500 is an interesting, if incomplete, insight into just how many people might need to be searching a term for it to get to the top of Google's Hot Trends.
Clearly there are more than 12,500 people who are up for promotion, so all we'd need to know is how many candidates there were, compared to the number of slots. If there were five candidates for every slot, on average, that would mean you could've gotten in the neighborhood of 60,000 people searching at the same time. But if there were only two people competing for each slot, you might only have 25,000.
Still, I'm going to take this as a temporary sign that it takes tens of thousands of simultaneous searches to move a term up the Hot Trends list, rather than hundreds of thousands, or millions.
Last week, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Loganappeared on Comedy Central to blast U.S. coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying "if I were to watch the news that you hear in the United States, I would blow my brains out."
Then yesterday, CBS extended Logan's contract and broadened her beat to include international security issues and matters of U.S. policy, making her one of the top international affairs journalists in the U.S.
And now today, strange timing, Logan has fallen into the gossip world's unflattering cross-hairs, with The New York Post and National Enquirer (with major amplification from The Huffington Post) spreading an anonymously sourced, partly contradictory story about Logan's sex life.
I won't stoop to repeat the "details" here, save to say that the Post's story leads with information -- such as that two men "brawled" over Logan -- that is disputed by more "sources" quoted later in the same story.
There can't be anything surprising about how Logan's personal business can sell more tabloids and rake in more cheap hits than her ascent into the top tier of journalism. Or that more people would click on a headline with the word "steamy" in it than would be interested in the astonishing way Logan called out her own media establishment for whitewashing the war.
David Sarno
is the Times' Internet culture and online entertainment writer. His Web Scout print column runs in the L.A. Times Calendar section on Wednesdays.
— Follow David on Twitter.
"I’ve been wracking 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."
