BoingBoing - Violet Blue - memory hole kerfuffle

I've resisted commenting on the kerfuffle in which all mentions of San Francisco blogger Violet Blue were suddenly erased last month from A-list blog BoingBoing. But today's Valleywag post by Melissa Gira Grant pretty much blows it wide open, reducing what initially seemed like a sinister case of Big Brother-type memory-holing into a jealous snit by an alleged former paramour.

The point most bloggers seem to be making -- that if this had happened anywhere else, it would have been reported with the usual mixture of glee and outrage on BoingBoing -- is hard to dispute. Pretty much every other aspect, such as Grant's parsing of BoingBoing's too-little-too-late excuse that it is entitled to be as "personal" and petty as it wants to be, is splitting the finest of hairs. There's a lot of harsh rhetoric blowing around the internets about this, including an anti-BoingBoing backlash [for example], and Grant's post will only inflame matters. What amuses me is how much it matters to everyone, making it clear that a high school hallway ethos pervades the internet and those who have become "famous" because of it. If anyone comes out ahead, it's Violet Blue, whose own comments and postings on the affair have shown admirable restraint. One thing I admire about Violet is that she always seems to remember that a few pixels one way or the other don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

technorati: Violet Blue, BoingBoing, internet censorship