If you're going to wish touchy actor Kevin Pollak a happy birthday, remember to spell his last name correctly. It's as written previously, or, colloquially, "Kevin WHO?"

Actress and singer Deborah Gibson has had it with her lying workout machine. (It totally sucks when that happens.)

Your "Twitter Latte" intrigues Twitter CEO Ev Williams. So he'll either be ordering one, or suing you. Or both!

Singer Fred Durst forgot to pay his check. He apparently didn't have time to go back and pay or tip or whatever, but he had time to tweet "Oops." Uh, LOL?

Business Insider (and former Valleywag-) contributor Alaska Miller wants less predictable cable news talking heads. Like maybe a redhead!

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

Six Apart's Anil Dash made a joke for people who remember 1986.

Tech writer Glenn Fleischman seemed to enjoy his heroic service in the peanut gallery.

Professional Twitter compiler Nick Douglas immediately grasped the real-world implications of Apple's shiny new toy.

Engadget's Joshua Topolsky made us wish we were more up to speed on Gawker Media gossip.

Xeni Jardin had a surreal CNN experience not involving Lou Dobbs or Anderson Cooper.

Jake Tapper engaged in passive-aggressive tweeting.

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

Digg founder Kevin Rose is sorry he forgot you don't have a magical VIP Web browser like he does.

Chris O'Brien of the San Jose Mercury News noticed a Yahoo profanity policy was kind of fucking hypocritical!

Oliver Knox's vacation to Paris began with some quality American customer service. Being an AFP man, he reported it.

Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin found the Ugly American, in Guatemala.

Writer Tricia Romano quietly cursed the blogger who revealed her happy secret.

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

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.

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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.

Outside.in chairman Steven Johnson, who is currently getting paid by venture capitalists to drink and promote his book, sparred with "I'm a PC" Apple ad star John Hodgman. (Actually, that is pretty awesome — the getting paid to drink part.)

Wired.com got hacked with the false report of a Steve Jobs heart attack. Wired editor Chris Anderson, who does not actually run his magazine's website because of Condé Nast's bizarre internal politics, pretended he was in charge, Al Haig-style.

Former Engadget editor Ryan Block fussed with his espresso maker.

Formerly important media person Bonnie Fuller stopped to wonder if she was rude. (Answer: Yes, but not because of that.)

Boing Boing space princess turned blogger Xeni Jardin coveted the BarackBerry.

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Spy cofounder Kurt Andersen couldn't believe it had all happened..

Software entrepreneur and technopontificator Mitch Kapor, once a candidate to be Obama's CTO, apologized for suggesting the all-new president looked old.

Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin hated capitalism.

Air America radio hostess Ana Marie Cox looked for politically amiable shelter.

And evil genius turned Beltway pundit Karl Rove fled town altogether .

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

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.

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)