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Unpublished

Not long ago, an "unpublished" work was one that had never been published. Boing Boing comments moderator Teresa Nielsen Hayden unintentionally popularized a new meaning of the word when she used it to describe posts the Boingers had erased from their site: "We unpublished our own work. There's a big difference between that and censorship." Now, Google's Wikipedia competitor Knol has completely broken the word's meaning. "The requested biographical knol has been unpublished by the author." Doesn't that sound like I wrote and then deleted my bio, rather than that I've yet to write it? Don't go hunting through Google's cache for it — you'll be sadly un-successful.

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