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When the New York Times weighs in on what appears to be a personal tiff on BoingBoing, you know us geeks really are taking over the world. The story so far; Violet Blue is a sex writer/blogger who was mentioned fairly often on BoingBoing, most often by contributor Xeni Jardin. For reasons unknown, the website removed every single post that contained any mention of Ms. Blue or her writings, leading to a thread on BoingBoing with over 1,400 messages discussing why and how this could have happened. Now while this may seem common in the realm of the internet, the Times points out the greater issue this incident brings to light: Unpublishing.

But here's the twist. The person who removed all the posts about Ms. Blue was the author of most of them and a former close friend of hers, Xeni Jardin. When asked why she removed all the posts, Jardin simply explained it “wasn’t a weird cover-up” and was based on “private matters and public behavior." Sounds like someone has a falling out. More details after the cut.

All this lead New York Times columnist Noam Cohen to ask "Was Boing Boing deceiving its loyal audience by silently deleting the material, even if no one noticed the absences until a year later? What does it even mean to deceive an audience when it comes to a catalog of one’s personal writings? And does popularity convey different responsibilities to the people who produce a Web site?"

Valid questions. I think the confusion may lie with the individual. Everyone sees the internet as something different, and if a well respected writer at "the Paper of Record" looks at an online collective blog as something akin to a newpaper, one might understand his fear of the ability to "unpublish" past works at the click of a finger. However, other people look at the internet as a constantly changing outlet of expression. Jardin was the author of the posts she removed, and since it was cleared by the owners of the website, she had every right to edit or remove anything she wrote for the website. But where does this lead? What does this mean on the larger scale for the blogosphere and the rest of the internet? For now, it just means that the New York Times is actually paying attention.

The New York Times: Link by Link - Poof! You're Unpublished!