story here.

...an n.teresting way 2 grab a readers attn...[got me in, i admit].

how i found it: am writing a new post 4 augmentology.com aboot micro_celebrity + avatar_chic + found it whilst researching. also finished Cory's _Little Brother_ recently. am now following the violet blue furor with sine_like waves of curiosity/concern.

chunks,
][mez][

Ok...

So...

It's bad if you decide to exercise your rights over the contents of your own blog, but it's perfectly ok to use someone else's (more famous) name to bring attention to your cause?

Riiight.

Are there bonus points if you misleadingly title links? Lucky the targets of those links had been deleted, because what would've happened if someone at work clicked that link for "The Top Ten Science Fiction Memes of 2006" and got something rather more inappropriate instead and got fired for it - hell, if these people feel the need to sue over someone removing content from a blog they owned, then I'm sure they'd be willing to bend over because they lied to someone. Oh, sorry about that, we were completely wrong in misleading you and take full responsibility for you getting the arse. Here's a hundred grand.

Not bloody likely.

As th- hang on. These are microcosm hippies that wrote the article.

Unfortunately, the s-word's be thrown down already, so Boing Boing's already partly screwed.

I can understand neither why this controversy is so huge nor why it is so boring.

quote:

Originally posted by IndividualFrog:
I can understand neither why this controversy is so huge nor why it is so boring.

IF, I think you've single-handedly saved wigber from itself with that deliciously rarefied question.

This story was just on TV. granted it was on G4, but still, didn't seem to warrant the attention. And yet I suppose the realm of internerds has now become the battleground for free speech.

I don't think it's really a huge free speech issue. Violet Blue has her own blog and a number of other forums for her views.

What it does bring home is that the BoingBoing people are, well, human, and prone to the same sort of knee-jerk reactions as other humans. This is only an issue because they tend to be very outspoken on issues of transparency and accountability in the media. I thought Xeni Jardin saying that "BoingBoing is not a big institution like the New York Times or the Washington Post" as if that was an excuse was a bit weird, though. Are blogs legitimate platforms for journalism or not? If they are, then BoingBoing is one of the biggest, and then they definitely are an institution which has an implied trust to uphold.

My understanding (and I still haven't taken the trouble to find out what the issue was) is that the root of the issue is utterly banal. BoingBoing's proper editorial approach would probably have been to ignore it completely.

BoingBoing is a flavor of ice cream, right?

I mean honestly, how does wee little BoingBoing delete great big William Fucking Gibson? I think it's more likely that BoingBoing was deleted from Gibson's reality, and we're just not evolved enough to perceive it.

It's just a fancy-pants version of "Random" thread, sanitized of inside-jokes.

I bet they felt they had to get rid of teh Gibson. Just to make the rest of it look less like crap.

That, or the pope got to 'em.

I knew the article was bullshit, you know why?

If William Gibson was ever deleted from cyberspace, all of cyberspace would vanish into a sterling wink of light reflected by wings of a receding chrome dream, accompanied by a cackling Jorge Luis Borges on flamenco guitar.

We would all awake Victorian and differenceless.

Oh, deleted from Boing Boing.

Can someone finally tell me what this business with Violet Blue is all about?

Basically, Violet Blue outed the vlogger for ABC (formerly of RocketBoom) since said vlogger worked for both ABC and for the Dupont vlogs (infomercials, basically). Journalistic conflict of interest on the vlogger's part was a possibility. ABC fired said vlogger, who was, apparently a "friend of BoingBoing" and then BoingBoing deleted VioletBlue's submitted stories and posts from the BoingBoing server.

'Tis a silly tit-for-tat. But if there was ever such a thing as free speech within journalism, we couldn't have The Washington Times, with its distinct right-wing bent or the The Washington Post, with its centrist-liberal bent.

Ok, thank you for clarifying.

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
Basically, Violet Blue outed the vlogger for ABC (formerly of RocketBoom) since said vlogger worked for both ABC and for the Dupont vlogs (infomercials, basically). Journalistic conflict of interest on the vlogger's part was a possibility. ABC fired said vlogger, who was, apparently a "friend of BoingBoing" and then BoingBoing deleted VioletBlue's submitted stories and posts from the BoingBoing server.

'Tis a silly tit-for-tat. But if there was ever such a thing as free speech within journalism, we couldn't have The Washington Times, with its distinct right-wing bent or the The Washington Post, with its centrist-liberal bent.

What do you mean "outed?"

Of the closet?

The issue seems to be that Boing Boing in all their self-righteous pomp has come off as hypocrites of the very freedom they moralizingly tout to the public everyday.

I hope the horse wasn't too tall.

I meant "outed" in terms of something "fishy" being disclosed. To wit, that Amanda Congdon was working both sides: ABC and Dupont. It seems from that much longer narrative that ABC was embarrassed into firing Congdon (or making her decide to resign under whatever pressure) because she also worked for Dupont.

Though it's interesting that nobody in the article really has a clear picture of what the impetus for the deletions was.

How incestuous!

Journalists have become a sordid lot of whores and gossips.

Print journalists also dislike TV journos.

Well, that's actually a bit less banal than I expected.

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
Print journalists also dislike TV journos.

There are far too many of them who are about as useful to society as lawyers these days.