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.

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]

In lieu of wedding gifts, the couple suggests charitable donations. A good idea — unless you want to buy them a $160 saucepan.

[Update: wedding page removed.]