More on Boing Boing and Violet Blue…

11 July 2008 | Community, Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media | Comments

Violet Blue kindly responded to my recent post about the L.A. Times story concerning how Xeni Jardin, one of the Boing Boing editors, removed references and links to her. You can find Ms. Blue’s comments here.

To recap, Ms. Blue utterly denies that Boing Boing removing links to her and her work would have any economic impact on her.

Feeling that I had perhaps been misunderstood, I posted the following comment on her blog:

Dear Ms. Blue,

Thank you for responding to my Mediavorous post about the current contratemps between you and Boing Boing.  I appreciate your engaging with my comments.  I accept completely that Boing Boing’s excision of references to you had no impact on your pocketbook.

However, I do want to clarify (and I’ll do this on Mediavorous as well) something that your excerpt from my post does not convey. Regardless of whether or not Boing Boing’s excision of references to you had any actual negative impact on you, the *desire* to have such an impact was a possible Boing Boing motivation that David Sarno at the L.A. Times had not considered in his article.  This was the point of my post, which is titled, “BoingBoing Brouhaha… L.A. Times Misses Story.”

While you and your work may be both invulnerable and indifferent to the vicissitudes of Google Juice, a good portion of the annual multi billion dollar online advertising industry — the industry that I serve professionally at ad:tech and iMedia — is powered by Google AdSense and similar programs (see this recent NY Times article for some relevant numbers: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/business/media/09adco.html). Many online publishers, particularly smaller ones, survive based on their Google Juice– a fact that would never be lost on the savvy editors of Boing Boing.

I was primarily speculating on a possible business motive.

I will also confess that I find most of this story mystifying as one of the more constant truisms about the internet is that everything said on it is indelible and there are infinite numbers of people paying attention to details at a level unthinkable just a few short years ago… so why would Ms. Jardin think that nobody would notice?

Best of luck to you in your work.

Sincerely,

Brad Berens
Chief Content Officer & Editor at Large
ad:tech & iMedia
…and now blogging at www.mediavorous.com