Boingboing is cute, if you don't think about it too much, like a great many tech idealists.

"Copyfight" and the whole "damn the man DIY!" mindset is all well and good when you're young and poor, but these folks want to sell ad space and flog their other projects. There's a healthy balance, but their defensiveness, the "de-voweling" and general attitude of "we can't be corrupted, not by all this revenue!" is very tired. Yes, they're sellouts. Trying to claim they aren't just makes them look silly.

Again, look at the pretty, read the RSS and just don't think about it too much.

When Frauenfelder appeared in an Apple TV spot a few years ago, his fans loved seeing their fringe-culture hero take over the boob tube. But today ads are jammed full of Internet hipsters. Boing Boing's "band manager," John Battelle, has turned old-fashioned host endorsements into an online art form at Federated Media, his advertising agency. He's holding a conference right now in San Francisco's Presidio, telling eager brand managers that endorsers like Mark Frauenfelder make them part of a conversation with Internet consumers.

Battelle builds sites whose ads feature authors on whose blogs he also sells ads. It's a reputational Ponzi scheme far more complex than a George Foreman grill. Maybe that's why I flinch when Frauenfelder's face pops up on my screen with an Adobe logo and a button that says Grab Widget. Mark, if I want a widget, I'll open your magazine and make one myself.

Blue may not like what Burch has to say about her online, but when does obsessive Wikipedia editing cross the line into stalking? She'd have good grounds for a libel suit if it were standard defamation. Or if it were false — one of Burch's claims is that her legal name has not always been Violet Blue, but Wendi Sullivan Blue. But she's not claiming libel, and Blue's Internet presence extends way beyond a paltry Wikipedia entry about her.

Let's guess how it will play out: Armed with a posse of Internet yaysayers, Blue will complain that no, really, she's so threatened by a single page on the Internet that she's willing to go to court to block anyone whose edits upset her. We may as well give her a SXSW panel now.

Violet Blue's complaint:

(Photo via Violet Blue)

Xeni Jardin, for one, has changed her tune. The extragalactic editrix says she still considers Boing Boing to be the editors' personal site, but "[w]e are no longer just a small personal blog, obviously, and the way I think about the blog has changed.” She'll need to factor in the possibility that other hangers-on will want a piece of her in the future.

Blue, a social climber who used her friendship with Xeni to get prominently name-checked at least 70 times by a powerful blog, is only the Bizarro World winner here. She's got her MySpace Queen photo in the New York Times, to the envy of other self-described "sex bloggers." She got the newspaper of record to parrot her phony claim that she has no idea what she did to drive Boing Boing away. It's almost a factual error. We're 100 percent sure that Jardin spelled things out in detail to her more than once.

The rest of us have learned just how much of the blogosphere's drama goes unblogged. There's an unspoken agreement among clique members to keep the real story off the Internet under the premise of solidarity. Against who? We didn't get the memo.

(Photo: Ann Johansson for The New York Times)

Xeni Jardin: There wasn't some kind of sinister plot here. It's just kind of how we did things. But at the time, I did that for personal reasons, and for a back story that will always remain private.

John Battelle: What's made it 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. Anything that we might change that affects that magic, we really have to think about.

Joel Johnson: The community expected us to react with the speed that they reacted.

David Pescovitz: I'm not going to say — I haven't determined — whether I agree or disagree that Xeni should've unpublished the posts.

John Battelle: 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. The question is: Do you damage the community in doing so?

And a bonus dance remix:

Xeni Jardin: This is my work, this is my blog. This is not the same thing as Wikipedia or the paper of record. It’s Boing Boing.

(Photo by Bart Nagel)

I'd make a "so meta" joke here, but apparently you pseudomodernists are beyond that by now. In a further twist, site creator Ed Hunsinger is perfectly within his rights to un-unpublish work from Boing Boing under the site's Creative Commons license noncommercially, as long as it's properly attributed — though that does shut him out of turning his traffic into pageview gold with ads brokered by, say, Boing Boing band manager John Battelle's Federated Media. Yes, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning.

As a human being with a soul in there somewhere, I've avoided blogging about the Xeni-Violet scandal. But as a wannabe comedy writer, I found myself obsessively poring over the 1,200-plus Metafilter comments on our report. I'd forgotten why I love-hated Metafilter: It's a boyzone of spiteful, pseudonymous insult comics, but many are snappy with the English language. "Instead of calling it what it is, they're going to clown us with semantics." Red meat for you guys at MeFi: The "homophobic" headline on yesterday's post was added by big gay Owen Thomas himself. Discuss.

I also did not sleep with Xeni Jardin, though via someone I've slept with who slept with Blue, I'm only one more degree of separation from her bed. And if you hop a few lovers, it's almost like I've slept with another Boing Boing editor, Cory Doctorow. What I do have to disclose: It was Xeni Jardin who forwarded me Paul Boutin's original search request for a new Valleywag reporter, back in January. Founding Valleywag editor Nick Douglas is the only one around Valleywag that I do fuck, and that's never bought him a break from our standard abuse. Plus it's fun.

For Blue, we've come to believe, the friendship always had a mercenary angle — Jardin could get her linked as well as laid. The association with Boing Boing boosted Blue's career. How painful it must have been for Jardin to realize she was being used by a groupie who wanted to join her band. And people in pain exercise supremely bad judgment, which is what Jardin did when she "unpublished" posts about Blue from Boing Boing. She must have wanted to forget all about Blue. In a tragic example of the Streisand effect, Jardin's actions have made it all the harder to do so. Violet Blue's little-girl-lost email:

you know, I really honestly have no fucking idea. romance? well, it is true that Xeni and I has casual sex a few times years ago, but we never had a relationship and the friendship continued when the sex stopped happening — well before the alleged year ago that the posts were nuked. but perhaps she was looking for a reason not to like me anymore? thing is, I don't know what that reason would be. no one told me I'd done anything wrong, they just secretively removed the content (even, I've discovered, content not about me but just a mention of my name). I can't imagine how I went from years of being beloved by the BB crew to being such a despicable character that they would do something so extreme and well, rather insane. or, actually reading through the comments on the BB post about it, one person. there's one comment where Pesco makes it clear that one person did this.

I'd really like to see a public discussion about what one person could do to deserve what is now unquestionably punishment. can someone please show me what I did wrong? and tell me why no one told me I did something wrong? no, that would mean being really honest and transparent. I can't think of a single event a year ago that would make BoingBoing remove all those posts (and yes, it was upward of 100 — I have records of 72 of them, and there were certainly more).

what's most disturbing to me is to see them trying to pull a smoke and mirrors on the whole thing. and that they only responded when the LAT piece went up — not when the blogosphere was demanding answers. they've handled this so badly from day 1. deleting comments, ignoring it for a week, doing the thing in the first place and not telling anyone, saying it's a big sekrit, and pretending to have a discussion about... nothing. you'd think for being such media figures they'd know how to play this game better.

from my comments:

Xeni's comment ( http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/01/that-violet-blue-thi.html#comment-223265 ) really makes me laugh:

"Blog fights are stupid, airing personal grievances in public is stupid"

Then why delete all the posts? Why not just not just cut future ties and no one will ever know the difference?

/comment

oh, and here's my sheet with all the posts — you can see even Xeni's personal Guatemala post was removed, as was other non-sex news my name just happened to pop up in. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pzVyO44trg7yCes1ugr7DFg

so, how does one get to be so bad, so evil and so notorious that even the 800 lb. gorilla of the blogosphere sacrifices their integrity to stay away from you? you could ask me, but I have no idea. and BoingBoing's not telling.

I didn't do anything wrong.

xo

As new media gets big, it remains small at heart — and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" — though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle — Boing Boing's "band manager" — a multimillionaire. Oh, and did we mention that Violet Blue, the sex blogger in question (and contributor to Gawker Media's Fleshbot), shown here at right, used to be the lover of Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, left?

Some have speculated a love triangle or some other romantic crash-up might be at the heart of the blog spat. The only name in circulation is Kevin Sites, a war reporter that Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin got into blogging in 2003. Did Blue have her eye on Sites? Given that she blogs her own love affairs, including her own despair that she can't blog more about them, and her love affair with Jardin herself, it's doubtful that this triangle is so well-concealed the prolific Blue wouldn't have dropped a Flickr of a hint somewhere.

A more likely inspiration, though more pedestrian, is that Blue's move to trademark "Violet Blue," once her pseudonym and now her legal name, ran afoul of Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow's self-avowed obsession with destroying intellectual property law as we know it. A Northern District of California Court granted author Blue an injunction against the porn performer Violet Blue at the end of May 2008, but the trademark filing itself was in 2007 — about a year ago, which is when Boing Boing claims that the posts mentioning Blue were first unpublished.

But there's one more very likely reason why Boing Boing's editors might have decided to wash their hands of Blue: Her desperate coattail-riding. Before this dispute, Blue had been known to call herself "the fifth Boing Boinger." That's more than a stretch. A crucial point lost in the discussion is that the posts in question, save one, were not actually written by Violet Blue, a fact that bolsters Jardin's take:

This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory.

A bit harsh, maybe. But reputations have been made on the backs of a Boing Boing link, and Blue is no exception. Even this controversy is now serving to further her career.

This last explanation seems to fit best. But if Blue's ladder-climbing was the issue, why not say that? That hardly seems personal; it's simply business. As it stands, Boing Boing's editors come off looking foolish with their vague pomposities: "Violet [Blue] behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her." They want to retain the authenticity of a "personal" blog, with all its quirkiness, to attract an audience discontented with impersonal big media, while claiming that it's too "personal" to explain an editorial decision to that audience. If Boing Boing's readers expect better of it, its editors only have themselves to blame.

(Photo by Jacob Appelbaum)

Boing Boing certainly hasn't gotten squeamish about sexuality if today's post about a Miami "brothel bus" is any indication. Why is the disappearance an issue? Because Boing Boing wields the awesome power of traffic and Google PageRank, and to bestow such benefits on a blogger and then take them away can be a severe punishment in terms of advertising and affiliate business lost.

I'd long thought that Battelle's flip-the-bird photo, used here, was a reflection of his charmingly combative personality. As a founding editor of Wired, which set the tech world on fire in the '90s and helped inflate the bubble, Battelle failed to stack up the tall dollars. He founded The Industry Standard, which sold more pages of advertising than any other magazine in American in 2000 and then went bankrupt in 2001. Battelle, in short, has been adept at chronicling booms, but not profiting from them. Until now.

Battelle is just the latest entrepreneur to cash out before his company goes public, a practice once frowned upon in Silicon Valley. But Federated Media turned profitable last fall, we're told. Being cash-flow positive means never having to say you're sorry. And it also gives entrepreneurs leverage with investors that they never had in the '90s, when building Web companies was much more expensive.

So at last he's earned what they call in the Valley "fuck-you money" — enough money to simply walk away, should a job turn unpleasant. In fact, we hear that's what Battelle is planning to do, albeit temporarily. He's told investors in Federated that he plans to take a leave from the business to work on his next book, The Conversation.

Where Battelle's profane wealth may get him in trouble is with the bloggers he represents. Unlike him, most of them have yet to cash out, or even turn a profit. Federated Media's take of their advertising — typically 40 percent — strikes many as too high, though most have yet to try their hands at hiring and managing their own salespeople.

But they shouldn't worry. Having enriched himself, Battelle is now thinking of them. After hearing rumors that one of Federated's blogs was in merger talks, he approached the blogger and encouraged him to come talk to Federated first before taking an offer.

In other words, Battelle is now contemplating a blog rollup. Rather than see his customers picked off one by one, with their ad inventory walking out the door, Battelle may use some of the money he's raised to buy blogs himself. It only makes sense. He knows his customers' businesses well, since he organizes conferences, orchestrates redesigns, and performs other services besides for them, in addition to the mundanities of selling advertising.

Battelle likes to think of himself as more than just a business partner to his bloggers. He's their buddy. He's their pal! This bubble has everyone frothy, and the valuations may be making some of the bloggers under his care unduly giddy. While Battelle may enjoy a tipple now and then, friends don't let friends sell drunk.

—-—-—-—-—-—- Introducing BBtv vlogs! Today: Joel from BB Gadgets. It's been a little more than two months since we launched Boing Boing tv, and we've decided that producing a daily internet show just isn't enough. Meet BBtv vlogs!

OK, seriously: starting today, we'll be releasing these additional videoblog segments in addition to the every-weekday Boing Boing tv episodes. The vlogs won't be every single day all the time, but we're going to have fun with them.

What's the difference? The BBtv vlogs will be casual, conversational stuff we mostly tape ourselves, wherever we are. They'll feature Boing Boing editors talking about things, people, ideas, places, technologies we're fascinated by. They're more like video diaries, I guess? Only less emo, no ranting about your YouTube enemies, and ffs no dance contests.

So, imagine Pesco talking with one of those artists he blogs about, or Cory wandering around in Tokyo with a handheld camera pointing out cool stuff he's seeing that day, or Joel Johnson from Boing Boing Gadgets talking about about little infrared controlled helicopters or retro-tech radios — oh hey, wait! That's the vlog episode we're publishing today, our very first.

And Joel, if you have never *seen* him speak before, is quite a funny guy. His video diary stylee is sort of like HSN meets America's Funniest Home Videos meets Slackers. — Xeni Jardin (thx, JGB!)

The Onion
When it was worth reading: In the 90s, when it was fresh and fake news hadn't yet been properly done. Articles started with an ironic lede and developed into a larger farce, like the 1997 story "Supreme Court Overturns Car," which depicted the Court as a wild frat. Just three years ago, the Onion still successfully mined the mundanities of modern life: Wikipedia sticklers, cops suspecting terrorists and teens, fat women¹, and Christian rock bands.
Why you must stop: The Onion is like Dane Cook: where are the jokes?² The schtick — ironic headline, similarly ironic lede, endless reiteration of lede — is tiresome. "Not So Horrible Thing Happens In Iraq" might have been funny four years ago. This parody of unfunny humor columnists feels witty until you realize you could write its series of non-jokes yourself.
Maybe the Onion didn't even change — it just looks worse against all the new competition. Politics is better satirized by the Daily Show franchise, celebrities better mocked by bloggers, mundanity better picked apart by more bloggers.³ All that's left for the Onion is the same observational humor that normal people make. Instead of telling a friend, "Hey, isn't that Wes Anderson movie just like all his others? Heh, and he always puts the Kinks in the soundtrack," you can send a friend the Onion article that says just that. Ha! Ha! This article is funny because it's true!⁴
What it's still good for: Mocking other lame publications, as in "Pitchfork Media gives music 6.8." And the AV Club is still neat.
Replace with: NPR puts its weekly news quiz, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! online. It's not as hip, but that's why it has room to be funny. By the way, they had Colbert on this week.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency
When it was worth reading: About four years ago.
Why you must stop: Just like the Onion, McSweeney's has fallen into an endless schtick. Everything is either "A thing as if it were done by my family/co-workers/friends" or "I am an expert at normal life" or "Overextended metaphor"⁵ or "Basically an Onion column "Mundane thing done wacky!"
What it's still good for: Outsourcing your own jokes. The last funny article on this site was "Thomas Kincade's Experimental Period."
Replace with: Old Garrison Keillor collections. Try "Happy to Be Here" or "We Are Still Married." For fresh funny, read the humor section of The Morning News, or get over your wry self and read some balls-out humor at Corporate Casual.⁶

CNN.com
When it was worth reading: When the only other option was TV
Why you must stop: It's not news, it's fark: sensationalist stories that don't constitute world-changing news. The site's headlines, often with invitations to "watch this," have long been fodder for Gawker. The front page looks like an "oddly enough" section. So either take that to its logical conclusion and read full-on trash, or switch to a real news site.
What it's still good for: I dunno, knowing what other CNN readers are talking about?
Replace with: MSNBC for better (not perfect) mainstream headlines; Drudge for a quick screamy snapshot of the day's stories, and Fark for stupid news.

Perez Hilton
When it was worth reading
Why you must stop: It's vile, unimaginative pulp by a man who is friends with Paris Hilton. Perez's taste in celebrities is only outshittied by his writing style. Maybe everything that sucks has some connection to Dane Cook, because Perez's weak neologisms⁷ could have been coined by the inventor of the "SuFi."⁸
What it's still good for
Replace with: The Superficial has decent writing, Pink is the New Blog has better photo vandalism.

Boing Boing
When it was worth reading: When one blog could catalogue all the wacky things on the Internet.
Why you must stop: The net's too big now, and Boing Boing misses plenty. That's fine, it's not their job to make sure no one sees something funny and weird before you do. But the best stuff shows up in a million other blogs anyway, so Boing Boing is no longer a must-read.
What it's still good for: Boing Boing TV (a new series) has original . Xeni Jardin⁹ interviews people like the director of the Simpsons movie and Bill Gates's Microsoft co-founder.
Replace with: Tumblr blogs, which have all the junk-drawer appeal with none of the context or commentary. Try Tumbl.us, Scribbling.net, and A Garden of Varied Delights. If you want something higher-class, savor the baroque feel of Kottke and Fimoculous.

¹Whatever the Dove campaign says, fat women will always be fun to laugh at.
²Or like Steve Wright's unfunny cousin. Or like New Yorker cartoons in which, says Gawker, "the rate of humor is the exact same as naturally occurring humor in the world."
³And "The Office."
⁴Before I realized how desperately unfunny it would be, I originally wanted to write a parody article called "Onion makes observation about modern middle-class life, stretches premise out to 1000 mildly amusing words."
⁵See also: 1, 2, 3. I thought about just listing McSweeney's headlines and hoping you'd get the picture, because that seems to be the style McSweeney's readers respond to.
⁶Disclosure: The writer of "Corporate Casual" sometimes writes for the same publisher as mine. This isn't even really a disclosure, I just want him to notice me and maybe Facebook message me, like, "thanks doug for the plug."
⁷"Fauxmance." Okay, not even his word.
⁸It's the finger, but with the ring finger extended too. It's a "super finger." He named a company after it.
⁹Fun Fact: If Hillary Clinton is Data from Star Trek¹⁰, Xeni Jardin is that sexy Cylon from Battlestar Galactica.
¹⁰Or Johnny Five from "Short Circuit"

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag and Too Much Nick. Those things you like? He is over them. But he listens to Billy Joel, so you're still ahead.

But in reality? Plenty of independent artists with few resources feel even more strongly about protecting their rights than large studios churning out action blockbusters. For example, writer Ursula K. Le Guin, whose copyright Doctorow blithely violated.

Doctorow claims, "I enjoy watching Bruce Willis beat up fighter jets with his bare hands as much as the next guy." No, Cory, you don't. Why does Doctorow hate blockbusters? Because he knows deep in his heart that he will never, ever produce one.

You can read the full-length complaint on science fiction legend Jerry Pournelle's site.

Best parts:

Dear Jerry,

something that might be of interest to your readers that Ursula K. Le Guin contacted me about: Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net infringed her copyright by reprinting the entirety of her short story "On Serious Literature" on boingboing without authorization; he misrepresented her intent in his copy; he omitted her copyright notice; and he instead placed a Creative Commons license on it indicating that others can freely copy and alter her story.

The boingboing copy is of the entire text of the short story, which would not be covered under Fair Use. Doctorow has spoken widely on copyright matters and the limits of Fair Use, so he should be aware that copying an entire work is not permitted.

Doctorow and boingboing, of which he is billed as a principal, operate for personal gain via advertising revenue, merchandise sales, publicity for his books, etc. Under copyright law, copyright infringement for commercial advantage may be considered a criminal offense.

—Dr. Andrew Burt As approved by Ursula K. Le Guin

Now, for Burt, it's payback time. Doctorow has removed the Le Guin piece and posted an apology. His interpretation of copyright law, which he says he discussed with scholars:

I did this with the understanding that reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute.

(Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

The icons flash by beginning 10 seconds into the video below.

From: A. Koford
Subject: RE: Icons in the new BBtv thinger
Date: October 11, 2007 4:16:46 PM PDT

Here's a list in what I'm pretty sure is the final order:
A sorry popsicle, Ren and Stimpy, xkcd, $100 laptop, Pac-Man, the Apple logo, a comic book, a squid, the EFF logo, Bigfoot print, an Amy Crehore painting, John Hodgman's "H in sunrays" hobo sign, a LOLcat, Spock, a Coop painting, iPhone, a steampunk laptop, an old school NES controller a flying saucer, a Tim Biskup monster, a mushroom, Bob, the beginning of the AACS key, a tiki idol, Make magazine, Mario, R2D2, Devo, Mickey Mouse, a Lego man, TSA baggie, NSA, a sad Mac icon, ukulele, a goatse icon, and finally a unicorn.

Mash 'em up yourself with this Photoshop file of all 36 icons. Please observe the Creatve Commons license on the work — non-commercial use only, with attribution.

For a vlog, yes. A 1960s-vintage clip about a future e-shopping and e-mail system is surprisingly prescient. Xeni's segment on online lists (and in typical Boing Boing aesthetic, a book for making lists offline), is easy to follow thanks to her NPR-seasoned voice. It won't teach Facebookers anything new, though. I suspect she's aiming to draw newcomers rather than pander to the Metafilter insider crowd. But the theremin-playing robot? That's what Boing Boing does best. I had only one question for both hosts:

boutin: WTF with all the hair gel?
xeni: when we are floating around on our spaceship
xeni: IT STILL LOOKS EXCELELNT
xeni: IN ZERO G

A promised commercial from IBM (which bought a three-month sponsorship) didn't materialize in time for the launch. They slid in a 1950s plug for Kroger's eggs. Aspiring edgy ad buyers better get in line now, because BBtv's next two episodes will cover two place-to-be topics: vaginas and lobotomies.

The show's publicists gave the Los Angeles Times exclusive dibs on the TV-centric story. (A few goofs in the LAT's first post: Boing Boing began as a printed magazine, not a "webzine" — there was no World Wide Web in 1989 — and didn't go online until 1998. Editor David Pescovitz is based in San Francisco, not Paris. Cory Doctorow is in London rather than Tokyo. And here we thought old media factchecked.) But what Net geeks want to know is: Why does Ted Turner's TBS own the boingboing.tv domain? The show's URL will be tv.boingboing.net.

(Photo by Jacob Applebaum)

Thomas Crampton, a former International Herald Tribune reporter turned extremely amateur videoblogger, cornered spunky Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow to discuss how to be a better blogger at a conference in China. Doctorow's advice was rather straightforward: Write headlines as if you work for a newswire so search engines can figure out what you're writing about. (We wish he had offered Crampton advice on shooting video interviews instead — or rather, how to pick up a laptop and type notes for a written blog entry, so search engines can figure out what your interviewee is talking about.) But Doctorow couldn't resist a competitive swipe at Gizmodo, the gadgets blog Boing Boing is now taking on.

Gizmodo, we'll gladly disclose, is owned by Gawker Media, Valleywag's publisher. Doctorow, however, did not disclose that Boing Boing had just launched Boing Boing Gadgets, a blog written by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. Doctorow's advice to Crampton is to avoid hiding necessary information behind page jumps:

Don't make your blog suck to increase your page views. 'Click here to read more important information about this,' because we think about you as a sticky eyeball, as an ambulatory wallet, as someone who's attention is to be bought and sold opposed to a reader.

True enough, about having to click through. One could have a debate on whether it's more useful to have the complete item on a blog's homepage, or to just excerpt items, as Valleywag and a host of other blogs do, so that readers can get more items at a glance without having to click "Next" to get to a new page of older items. But what we really think is sleazy is taking a swipe at a competitor and not disclosing your vested interest in talking trash about them.

The real loser in this whole Youtube/Plaxo spam-a-drama is undoubtedly YouTube, which earned wrath from the quick-to-judge, quick-to-correct-itself blog Boing Boing by daring to associate with this black sheep. In his note to Boing Boing writer Xeni Jardin, Plaxo rep Joseph Smarr at least worked in a TechCrunch plug. YouTube didn't bother replying to Xeni's questions, but they're busy smelling their own rats.

Co-written with Gottfried the Intern

Share a YouTube video = share friend's email with Plaxo? [Boing Boing]

http://www.valleywag.com/tech/youtube/youtube-gets-snippy-at-snippers-189049.php#more

How disappointing it was to see such an inaccurate item on Valleywag.

I hope this doesn't seem rude, but I'm ccing some people who've been
involved in this discussion, directly and indirectly.

Last Thursday, at 9:07am PT, I posted an excerpt of Wired News
blogger Eliot Van Buskirk's analysis of the YouTube Terms and
Conditions. As Eliot wrote in his post, it is customary when blogging
about a legal document not to post the full text of lengthy
lawyerese, but rather to excerpt the parts relevant to the discussion
at hand. Both Eliot's post and the BoingBoing post that followed
linked to the entire T&C, to provide context. No conspiracy to hide
anything here.

I updated the BB post a number of times on Thursday, attaching some
reader comments which were critical of YouTube's policy, and others
that weren't. That's what we do on BoingBoing, all the time. What we
produce is more like a conversation than a permanently fixed
document. We're not the "etched stone tablets of wonderful things,"
we're a blog, and that's what blogs do.

Despite having been invited to respond early in the day, YouTube only
contacted me with a statement at 7:29PM on Thursday, hours after I'd
posted a second item with further analysis from the EFF's Jason
Schultz, and others. But I posted YouTube's reply within five minutes
of receiving it. YouTube's spokesperson thanked me for this, and
expressed appreciation for the wide range of user comments we'd also
published in the interest of broad discourse.

YouTube didn't spank anyone here. I invited them to reply, and
eventually they did, but not with any points we'd failed to cover
already. None of this "actually negated the original story," as you
wrote — but broadened it.

I'm not a lawyer, but the heart of what concerned many about the
YouTube T&C is well-summarized on Violet Blue's blog today:

"[YouTube does] have a TOU that effectively forces
users to remove their content in order to know they
completely control what happens with their
video/images/music. If you want your full rights,
the way to enforce ownership is to delete your
videos from the service."

Or, as Van Buskirk wrote in the comments section of his original
"Listening Post" item:

"The fact that YouTube is not required to alert you
to when they use your content, means that they
can use your content before you can remove it.
It's kinda moot to remove it from the site after
they've already used it."

And contrary what you wrote, YouTube's spokesperson never told us
that the T&C reported as newly revised by Wired News (and referenced
as such on BoingBoing) was anything but that. It seems odd that
YouTube's spokesperson would fail to point out something so
significant, if this were indeed old news as you maintain.

Fortunately for all of us, standards of business practice on the
internet tend to evolve over time. When people demand greater
clarity, flexibility, and transparency, and when those same people
have opportunities to talk back to companies about what seems fair
and what doesn't, these standards tend to evolve for the better. I
believe that honest, well-researched discourse online is essential to
this evolution.

I believe companies like YouTube that rely on user-submitted content
have a responsibility to explain in plain language what they do and
don't plan to do with user content. I believe these companies also
owe it to users to disclose clearly what information they may share
with government and law enforcement, under what circumstances. I
believe these companies should also clearly state what constitutes
"adult" or "obscene" material. I believe all of these types of
policies are too often ill-defined, and I believe people have a right
to expect better.

And I believe all of that constitutes significantly more than "no
story," as you wrote.

You are of course welcome to update Valleywag with the content of
this email, though I'll understand if you don't. We don't all believe
in the same things.

Xeni Jardin

From: Nick Douglas, Valleywag
To: Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing

I strongly disagree about most of these points and believe you're sidestepping the issue that you never put YouTube's response at the top of a post, while you put anti-YouTube information on the tops of two posts.

The language used in " YouTube's new policy says: we own your content" is misleading and implies a more pernicious ToU, like that of Podshow. By not picking the right battles, we could all step into the trap of extremism and be written off when a real issue demands attention.

I don't want to shut down this discussion, but I'm afraid any reply you make has to be our last about the issue, since we're both very busy with other things. With your permission, I'll post your previous e-mail on Valleywag, possibly with my above reply.

Boing Boing flashed the headline "YouTube's new policy says: we own your content" yesterday, linking to a Wired News story that said as much. But the writer they quoted conveniently snipped out the first and last sentences of a scary-looking passage. That writer — Eliot Van Buskirk — nearly fooled us all. (I even figured out how to exploit YouTube.)

But as Boing Boing eventually noted, Eliot clipped out these two lines, which were in bold on the site.

"For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions."
"The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website."

In other words, if anyone bothered to check the terms instead of swallowing Eliot's story whole, they'd realize there was no story. YouTube, a little miffed at the whole affair, gently spanked Boing Boing on its corporate blog.

By the way, the "new" terms have been up since last year.

YouTube's new policy says: we own your content. [Boing Boing]
More on YouTube's controversial new terms and conditions [Boing Boing]
Our Terms of Use Clarified [YouTube]

Media mogul Battelle owns Federated Media Publishing, the rapidly expanding ad network that's signing up every coolhunting site. Among his culture-shaping properties:

• Boing Boing, the four-writer blog approaching 1 million pageviews a day (not much smaller than the audience of the Colbert Report)
• Digg, the newer sexier Slashdot rumored to have declined a $40 million offer from Yahoo
• Fark, the giant trashy amusement park of the Internet
• Metafilter, incubator for trendy A-list bloggers
• Newsvine, where molehills become news headlines
• PopURLs, a new addition collecting popular links from Digg, Del.icio.us, and Furl
• PSFK, the trend-spotting blog by coolhunting consultant Piers Fawkes
• Reddit, a general-interest Digg-like site with even more instant voting gratification

As Valleywag friend and blogebrity watcher Kyle Bunch puts it, "Now an item can get run on BoingBoing, then dugg, then re-seen on popurls" — and Boing-Boinged, Newsvined, and Farked — and Battelle gets a cut each time.

Federated Media Authors Index [Federated Media Publishing]
Photo: John Battelle [JD Lasica on Flickr]