Xeni Jardin Takes the Heat on Boing Boing Conference Call
Quick backstory: Boing Boing removes all mention of sex columnist Violet Blue from its records. The news comes out, all hell breaks loose, Boing Boing talks back, but fans are unimpressed. Soooo...
Yesterday Boing Boing held a conference call with Xeni Jardin, David Pescovitz, Joel Johnson, John Battelle of Federated Media, and The LA Times.
Apparently they talked for over an hour. Here's parts one and two of the convo.
The short and sweet: Xeni Jardin takes the blame for removing the posts. She also shares a little family history -- and I'm wishin' she didn't, because it feels like a cop-out (here's a little inside-shit for all the inside-shit you're not getting!). Then the Boingers talk "editorial autonomy," John Battelle puts Boing Boing's growth spurt in perspective, everyone discusses the philosophy of "site" and "content" ownership, and nobody says sorry. The end.
PS. For a directory of "formerly wonderful things" that included Violet Blue and were whipped off Boing Boing, check out VioletBlueVioletBlue.net (via those naughty naughty gossips at ValleyWag).
Now let's play the quotable-quote guessing game!
Please try to bear in mind, a year and a half ago when I unpublished this stuff, it was a time when there were a couple of hate web sites specifically about me.
What's made [Boing Boing] so good is that it's kind of an asynchronous jam between four musicians, without being in the same place or looking each other in the eye.
A lot of people who are part of our community felt that we weren't communicating with them as much as we should. And being told that by somebody who's part of your community and appreciates the work that you do means a lot to me.
We try to do what we think is right. Sometimes that works out better than it does other times.
Isn't it also the right of the person who put it up to take it down? If you were truly the owner, I think one could argue unequivocally that you had that right.
Comments
Yawn. "Xeni" and "Violet" are both obnoxious, so it's hard to care about this non-controversy.
This should be filed under "Who fucking cares" or "publicity stunts". Engadget still kicks their asses re: traffic and a stupid internal spat isn't what their readers want.