Gawker: valleywag, david pescovitz

How Comcast Bought Its Way Into Boing Boing's Good Graces

Owen Thomas — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:26:29 EDT

Until today, if edgy digerati blog Boing Boing mentioned Comcast, it was with a sneer that was practically house style. Suddenly Boing Boing has fallen in love with the "bumbing, evil" cable guys. Why? Money.

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.

Boing Boing's unapologetic eleventh-hour apologia

Melissa Gira Grant — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Boing Boing's readers, hopped up on free-speech rhetoric, continue to find the tech-culture blog's act of unpublishing unspeakable. Hoping to put the Internet's most enduring drama llama this month to bed, the Los Angeles Times rounded up four members of Boing Boing's staff yesterday for a late-night confab. The result is transcribed here and there, but for those about to launch into a three-day weekend, we salute you with only the most wonderful bits, perfect for around-the-barbeque reblogging. It is at once brilliant and brain-numbing in its inconclusiveness. But if the answer to bad speech is more speech, why not answer an act of unpublishing with more nonwords?

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)

Xeni Jardin, Kevin Rose, and friends get in bed with Virgin

Nick Douglas — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:10:58 EDT

After wooing San Francisco at its hub airport, Virgin America has enlisted seven Internet heroes to pitch the new airline. Seen here are Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing; Peter Rojas of Engadget; and Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose of Diggnation. You can see them in these Virgin cartoon spots, which are like C-minus episodes of Sealab 2021.