Boing Boing, the tech culture blog, went down today, and briefly thought it was under attack. BB blogger (and old Gawker Media hand) Joel Johnson tweeted that the site had been the victim of "cyberwar." The site had only hours earlier posted a "Cyberwar guide for Iran elections;" we asked Johnson via IM if he thought Iran was attacking Boing Boing:

Later, the real culprit emerged: It was Boing Boing's fault; the site had somehow posted every post ever to the front page, resulting in a 171MB index.html.

A similar drama unfurled yesterday on Andrew Sullivan's blog for The Atlantic. Sullivan, who has been blogging heavily about the situation in Iran, proclaimed he was under "digital attack," later clarified to be a denial of service attack. Then later, "it turns out our servers have just been overwhelmed... the tech staff has now ruled out a... attack."

(While Sullivan was under-credited for his tech problems, he was over-credited when Twitter reversed a decision to delay a planned outage, as Sullivan had urged. Though some observers said Sullivan was key to Twitter's reversal, it later emerged that the State Department liked played the crucial role in lobbying the microblogging service.)

If the Iranian regime does have the capacity to launch some sort of cyberattack, now may be the ideal time: There have been so many false alarms, it will take significantly longer to respond to the real thing.

Boing Boing noticed the warning (and groused that CNN had registered boingboing.tv a couple of years ago). But it turns out that the loudmouthed Parsons (full disclosure: I'm a weekly guest on his GoDaddy Radio show) is not the first to beat this Tuvalu-is-sinking drum. USA Today writer Kevin Maney looked into the issue some years ago: If the Pacific island sinks beneath the waves due to global warming, your .tv domains will still be safe. And knowing Parsons, he'll still be complaining about it.

(Photo by Getty Images)

Boing Boing blogger David Pescovitz writes about Comcast Town, a virtual world:

Comcast (a BB sponsor) ...

We stopped reading there, too. Pescovitz invites users to judge Boing Boing's entry into Comcast's virtual-world contest. Readers are eager to judge Boing Boing, but not about that.

They have wasted no time reminding Pescovitz of the only Comcast stories they're prepared to hear: Tales of FCC hearings packed with Comcast shills, installers falling asleep on Comcast customers' couches, and the evils of Comcast's war on file sharing and other bandwidth-heavy uses of their network.

It makes everyone look stupid: The Boing Boingers, for thinking they could take Comcast's money and escape criticism; Comcast, for entering the lion's den already smeared in blood; and Boing Boing readers, for thinking the blog had any credibility left to get up in arms about. We'll give the Boingers this much: At least it wasn't a promo for their latest book.

Associated Press managing editor Lou Ferrara reminisced.

Freelance writer Glenn Fleishman quite possibly spent more time concocting a metaphor for his work on a feature story than he did on the story itself.

Sassy conservative punditrix Michelle Malkin craved junk food, and not just the intellectual kind.

Boing Boing space-princess blogger Xeni Jardin seemed to mock her coworkers' obsession with copy protection.

Globetrotting tech-book author Sarah Lacy unleashed her gams on an unsuspecting Middle East.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

TechPresident's Micah Sifry leaked Obama Web guru Katie Stanton's complaint about government bureaucracy.

Boing Boing adventuress continued her travels in Africa.

Jake Tapper, ABC's resident hunk of red hot newsmeat, gave an incomprehensible update about President Obama's quest for culinary knowledge.

VentureBeat blogger Eric Eldon exemplified the South By Southwest work ethic.

As did Air America radio hostess and frequent alcohol seeker Ana Marie Cox.

Politico's Patrick Gavin ogled the oglers.

Salon.com editor-in-chief Joan Walsh confirmed people's general opinion of her.

Geek overlord and Digg founder Kevin Rose prepared to rule Austin at SXSW, the geek spring-break festival.

Former AOL employee and Engadget alumnus Ryan Block gloated over the firing of incompetent AOL CEO Randy Falco.

Boing Boing blogger and intergalactic space princess Xeni Jardin reported in from Africa.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing's sci-fi-tastic blogueuse from another galaxy, cheated on Hollywood.

Jewnadian Web-video comedienne Heather Gold lost her hat.

Political Lunch videoblogger Rob Millis smelled.

Jeff Jarvis, the world's most annoying new-media pundit, faked it.

AllThingsD blogger Peter Kafka stuck Rupert Murdoch with a recession-what-recession bill.

A memo from Neil Chase, one of Battelle's top lieutenants, explains the move as a strategic shift, with FM downplaying regular banner ads and playing up "conversational marketing," a fancy term for the kind of shilling that's common for radio hosts but considered verboten for print journalists.

Famously, Battelle got dozens of top bloggers to recite a Microsoft slogan in one of his "conversational" campaigns; several quit the campaign after Valleywag exposed their participation. More recently, Battelle has signed up less difficult spokespeople; a recent campaign for Intel features so-called "social media marketers" — PR and marketing consultants who are used to promoting the wares of paying clients.

Advertisers pay well to borrow bloggers' credibility. But getting them to purchase advertising on their sites? A far more difficult business. Online ad rates have been dropping fast, a result of ever-expanding supply and recession-softened demand. Federated Media had to discount rates last month, and lost a key customer in Om Malik's GigaOm, a tech blog network. No wonder Battelle wants to get out of the cutthroat online ad-network business, and focus on selling his customers' reputations instead.

Here's the memo:

Dear Authors,
We've been preparing for a tough 2009 by talking extensively with advertisers, agencies and authors about what's changing and how we need to adapt to do well in a tough economy. We've learned a lot, and today we're acting on it.

Sometime in the next hour or so, John will announce on the FM blog what we're telling the staff right now: A small number of employees are leaving FM today. We're sad about losing good people who have made valuable contributions to FM. We honor their service, we wish them well, and we'll do everything we can to help ease their transition.

Today we're changing FM to better support the conversational, customized programs that advertisers tell us they want. They're asking for more innovation, new ways to engage more deeply with your audiences, additional conversational tools and better measurement of results. While we're losing good people who primarily supported basic advertising campaigns, we're moving people within the company and adding new positions to beef up the teams that run our most complex projects. That means more help for engineering. It means additional project managers for conversational campaigns.

It means reassigning some salespeople to better serve those advertisers who told us they want to take advantage of the downturn to win market share from competitors.

John's post will explain more about these changes, and I'll be in touch again next week to introduce a new face on the Author Services team and tell you about some improvements in the ways we'll work with you when you're participating in conversational campaigns. Please contact me with any questions or concerns.

As always, thanks for being our close partners.
All my best,
Neil

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.

• Unpublished: Blacklisted. Made famous by Boing Boing, who insists that they didn't violate their standards of openness by hushing someone up.
  
• 
  
• Brand advertising: Bad clickthroughs. "We have a clickthrough rate of one in ten thousand, but we're more of a brand destination."
• 
  
• Influential: Unread. If a site isn't popular, it insists its small audience is made of "influentials" or "early adopters."
• 
  
• Update: Fix. On a blog or in a program, an update means something was broken.
• 
  
• Experimental: Failed. Everyone secretly hopes their projects take off, so they can say "Oh, it was just a fun little project!" More often, the project gets just the attention it deserved: none.
• 
  
• Long tail: Obscure. Because it's a book title, "long tail" has a cache that hides its actual meaning: things that get very little attention and only matter in aggregate.
  
• 
  
• Stealth marketing: Hoax. "Viral campaigns" like the dubious ad for headsets that showed phones popping popcorn (a scientific impossibility) are just fraudulent hoaxes. Putting them on YouTube doesn't change that.
  
• 
  
• Platform: Vague idea. Instead of a useful tool, a tool for other people to make useful tools. Possibly a cash cow, but boring. (For a geekier set, a platform is for those too lazy to code; an API is for those too lazy to write a platform.)
• 
  
• Pile-on: Unanimous criticism we're ignoring. Used by Boing Boing to imply that the lucrative commercial six-person blog had no chance to defend themselves from the masses of powerful, uh, blog commenters.
• 
  
• Stepping up: Stepping down. Used when a CEO is pushed out and exiled to the board or made "president."
• 
  
• Beta: Broken. For some web services, "beta" is as regular as PMS until Google buys the company.
• 
  
• Viral: Cheap. Of course, sometimes that's the kind of ad a brand deserves. Note which brand was faster to jump on viral videos: Not Coke, but Mentos.
  
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• Restructuring: Mass layoffs. Even shiftier than "downsizing."
• 
  
• User-generated: Quality-deprived. Or "can't afford an NBC deal." Except for a few impressive exceptions, user-generated content is a swamp not worth slogging through, which is why sites like YouTube set up a partner program for "better" producers.
• 
  
• Contextual advertising: Bottom-of-the-barrel ads. What's left over after "brand advertising" and served with "user-generated" content.
  

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