Critics have lambasted Blue for everything — from seeking the court injunction to having the filing fee waved due to a "credible threat of violence." We can't help sympathizing with her, because we know how difficult it can be to get anyone at Wikipedia to step in and moderate a dispute. There's only one sure-fire way to get your listing cleaned up — sleep with founder Jimmy Wales.

On 07/03/08 at approximately 1610 hours, off Russel at #1030 and I met with (R/V) Blue. Blue stated that approximately one year ago, she and (S)Alter were at an art show together, displaying a mechanical art project with several other people. Violet stated that Alter became jealous of Blue, and began acting very strange to Blue. Blue stated that was the last time she saw Alter.

After this incident, Alter becan visiting a web page on the Internet called Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a web page which the public can access to obtain information on people, places, and events, just like an encyclopedia. The public can add or delete information from Wikipedia, it does not require a password, or any validity to statements placed on the web page.

Blue stated that, because of her celebrity status, Alter has become more jealous and envious of Blue, and accessed Wikipedia and changed, added, and deleted information regarding Blue's information. Blue believes that this is being done out of malice, however, she does not know the specific reason. Blue stated that she had received hostile emails in the past from Alter, however, they have stopped, and the emails were not threatening in any manner.

Blue stated that she is not in fear of her life, or of any physical harm from Alter. However, Blue stated that she is concerned of possible property damage because her vehicle was vandalized approximately one year ago, right after the art exhibit incident.

Blue stated that Alter has gone as far as to contact all kinds of friends of Blue's in order to infiltrate her life. Blue has created a time-line regarding all of the incidents, and friends which Alter has contacted. Blue gave me copies of the time line, emails, and web page printouts which I booked into evidence at the Mission Station. These printouts were not attached to the report on Blue's request because they contain personal information of friends, and because this report is available to the public, Blue requested that they not be attached, and that her phone number and house address not be listed as well. Blue requests that investigators contact her via the email address provided.

I gave Blue a case number and a follow up form. I advised Blue of attempting to obtain a restraining order at 400 McAllister St. Furthermore, I suggested to Blue to inform the web page master of Wikipedia of the incident, give them a case number, and request to have her information on Wikipeida locked so the public cannot alter it in any manner.

(Photo by Joi Ito)

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)

(Photo by 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)

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.

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.

Jobs told her off, saying her request was "rude." Surrounding Apple employees allegedly sniggered. Poor girl. As consolation, her retelling of the tale got her blog more than 3,000 votes on Digg. Ubiquitous egoblogger Robert Scoble caught Blue's reaction to the ordeal on video, eventually crashing Qik, his video-hosting service.

In case merely looking at sexy furniture pics was leaving you a bit frustrated, you might be interested in this interview starring Fleshbot Gal Friday Violet Blue (we're not sure which version), who went booty-to-booty with Slashdong's qDot at SXSW in Austin last week to unveil his latest teledildonic invention: the Twitterdildonic sofa, which uses a text feed from the already buzzworthy Twitter miniblogging service in conjunction with a software-engineered Rez Trance Vibrator to create the world's "first augmented reality couch". Even though he modestly calls his new tech mashup "completely useless", qDot has supplied the source code for anyone who wants to rig up one of these to replace that old Barcalounger in the living room—though all it takes is one look at Violet's face while she's sitting on the prototype during the interview to convince us that IKEA needs to start mass production on these things immediately. Who knows—it might even make sitting there looking at boring celebrity sex tapes all evening something to actually look forward to!

· "new getv episode: twitterdildonics and qdot" and "Twitterdildonic Stimulation" (QuickTime video @ tinynibbles.com + GETV)
· "Twitterdildonics" (slashdong.org)
· Twitter (twitter.com)
· "Mini-blog is the talk of Silicon Valley" (msnbc.msn.com)

Previously: The Ooh!, Porn Vegas Dispatch: Virtual Holes and Virtual Sticks, Marital Aid Test Kitchen: The Delldo, The Wiibrator, Sexy Furniture by Mario Philippona, Sonny Black Dungeon Furniture, Italian Sex Chair, Furniture Porn Movie, More Furniture Porn

Thanks to the several readers who wrote in to let us know that as of today, most (though not all) of the sites referenced in yesterday's post about something rotten in the state of Googleland where the sex blog and indie porn scene was concerned have been restored to their rightful place in Google's search results. As one reader said,

"I've been in the tech industry for many years and I'm wondering if we have an occurrence of what we used to call 'Xmas Software Flu' - where the office newbie (tapped to work through Xmas) is told to 'install that new module when things are quiet' - and royally f*cks it up? Given what Renato Silveiro reported in the BoingBoing version of the article (Google's indexing engine tearing his bandwidth a new one), I'm inclined to believe there were frantic phone calls in the Google neighborhood - including phrases like 'it's doing what? How f*cking often?'."

· Previously: Google Spanks The Little Guys