Furore over deleted posts at Boing Boing

A blogger deletes some of her own posts. So?

"Unpublishing from a website certainly is not uncommon, particularly after a lawyer sends a letter demanding it. And on obscure personal blogs presumably it happens all the time - a writer simply may have a change of heart. But when Boing Boing was recently discovered to have unpublished all references to a blogger named Violet Blue, some of its readers treated the decision as a step of utmost consequence, even though it took place about a year ago. A relevant discussion thread on the site, boingboing.net, has grown to more than 1,400 messages, the NY Times reports.

The issues here are clearly larger than the material itself, which amounted to at least 70 or so posts by one of the site's contributors, Xeni Jardin, in which she referred to the writings of - or simply gave a shout-out to -Blue, who is the weekly sex columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and a former friend of Jardin, reports Times writer Noam Cohen...

Jardin, who says she was the one who took down the posts, conceded that the decision to unpublish was uncharted territory. She would not discuss what precipitated her move other than to say it "wasn't a weird cover-up" and was based on "private matters and public behavior," she told the Times...

"The idea of someone unpublishing you is horrifying," Blue told the Times, casting the action as violating the informal "best practices" that have developed around blogging. "That is why this is a bigger issue than someone versus someone. Really, it is between Boing Boing and the world."

Source

I guess it's a sort of free speech issue but the blogger was obviously well within her rights. That the deleted links were to some sort of sexy site seems to be the problem.