Violet Vanishes

I'm sure all both of you who read this blog already know that Violet Blue is my friend and colleague -- Jackson West oh so wisely brought her on to SFist as a contributor, and when I joined the Chronicle I got to work with her again on her weekly column.  And I love hanging out with her.  Clearly, I'm not unbiased when it comes to Violet Blue, one of the smartest, funniest, and toughest people I know.

She's so funny, smart, and tough that she's made me do something terrible -- hope that a site is suffering from horrible technical issues, because the alternative?  Rotten.

And here's where I make another disclaimer -- when my responsibilities at the Chronicle involved SFGate, hell, even before that, when I was editing SFist, when people would send me enraged emails/post ranty blog posts about the policies of either publication, there was always a part of me that thought "Then don't read us!  There's a lot of sites on the internet, and if you don't like how we run things, well..."  Just because a site is popular doesn't make it a public utility, I get that, and folks can run things the way they want. 

There are only a few people I would go back on that thinking for, and Violet's one of them.  So, I gotta ask: where the hell did her Boing Boing posts go? 

Jackson suggests that she "rubbed someone at Boing Boing the wrong way," which takes me back to hoping that their MT4 build is unstable, or maybe their site migration got fucked up (sorry, my 6A friends!  Gotta consider all the possibilities!).  Because, man, Boing Boing has been such a leader in web transparency, ethics, and decency (not the sex is bad! kind of decency, the be a good internet citizen! kind of decency) that if Jackson is right?  That would totally fucking suck.

Of course, these questions are all just that -- questions -- because no one from Boing Boing is writing back to anyone who's asked them what's up.  And maybe that's because it's none of our damn business, maybe it was a deliberate act based on an emotional personal decision.  But if it was, I call bullshit.

My approbation or lack thereof isn't going to impact Boing Boing a whit, and, like I said, that's their house, and they can run it the way they want.  But Violet's my friend, and until I hear that Boing Boing's archives are all fucked up, I'm not going to give them another damn pageview.  And not just because, as Jackson says:

Because BoingBoing 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.

But because I know that -- because Boing Boing taught me -- that we're supposed to call out sites that do shit like that.  So that's what I'm doing.