The actual reasons may never be discovered, but Boing Boing, the perennially top ten ranked blog, has “unpublished (NSFW)” stories by, about, or mentioning author and sex columnist Violet Blue (NSFW).

Much has already been said about the Orwellianism of “unpublishing” and how it conflicts with the ethics of the web, as well as the incongruence between these actions and Boing Boing’s position on web censorship, media manipulation, and revisionism. And on July 1 Boing Boing itself joined the discussion. Thad didn’t go so well.

One theory suggests that Blue’s April 2007 column slamming Amanda Congdon may have touched this off. Another theory suggests that Boing Boing was pressured by (or simply wanted to please) closely embedded Federated Media. And if you think you know how this will play out, then play the news game (above), where they suggest this all started with a lovers’ spat.

My interest in this, however, is in how new media like Boing Boing are struggling with growth from small personal sites to multi-million dollar businesses ($one million in 2006). The question now is if the site will survive the transition without alienating the community that makes such sites successful in the first place.

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is one of my favorite photographers on Flickr. Her photos are amazing, and it’s clear a lot of people agree. That’s the easy part. Then two problems arose: First Rebekka discovered that somebody was selling her photos for profit, and she posted about it. The community was shocked, and angry. And then, and this is the second thing, Flickr removed her post about it.

And then the storm got worse.

More than a few cried “Censorship!” And the troubled spilled into the support forums, where 312 comments flooded in in almost no time at all. Finally, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield wrote in.

I’ve gotten the whole back story from the team and have read the forums, various Flickr groups topics and blog posts on this topic (as of a few hours ago), so I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up for which I take full responsibility.

He was on vacation when the news got to him, writing from a Treo in the desert, but he still managed to write the sort of message that a company dealing with a crisis dreams of.

The problem turned out to be that people were posting threats and home addresses and such, the kind of thing that can be real trouble (and serious legal and moral responsibility). Nobody really knows how to deal with that, I mean, communities have argued about that sort of thing for ages.

But in this case, Flickr closed the doors and removed the post and all its comments.

The photo was deleted — again, mistakenly — because of the direction the comments had gone, which included posting the personal information of the infringing company’s owner and suggestions for how best to exact revenge. It is an emotional issue and most people were there to support Rebekka in a positive way, but some of the angry mob behavior crossed the line.

Flickr is not a venue that we will allow to be used to harass, intimidate, threaten incite hatred against people — even if those people have done something wrong. We strive to be free and open, but just like laws against crying “fire!” in a crowded theater, a desire to promote free speech has it’s limits.

We get challenging situations on Flickr all the time: ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, ex-husbands and wives, disputes between business partners or landlords and tenants, posting photos and text with the intent of hurting someone else. These can be quite tricky to deal with morally and legally, and almost all of the time we make the right choice.

Having said that, this time, we made the wrong choice. The person who made the call is not, as has been suggested, stupid, incompetent, underpaid, under qualified, inexperienced or mean. They just made a big mistake (and feel inconsolably awful about it, by the way). We also did not have the right policies in place to prevent it from happening or rectifying it afterward. And that’s entirely the responsibility of the Flickr leadership team, and myself in particular.

flickr, customer relations, censorship, community, community standards, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir

My ALA email newsletter arrived today with this story:

Sports Illustrated decides libraries don’t need swimsuit issue

Librarians on Publib and other discussion lists discovered in the first week of March that none of them had received the February 14 “swimsuit issue” of Sports Illustrated. Inquiries to publisher Time Warner eventually resulted in a statement from spokesman Rick McCabe that the company had withheld shipment of that issue to some 21,000 libraries and schools because for years the magazine had received complaints it was too risqué. In a March 9 statement, ALA President Leslie Burger called Time Warner’s decision “patronizing and paternalistic in the extreme.”

Yeah, the story is that this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, the one with Beyonce Knowles on the cover, wasn’t sent to libraries.

Clicking through, I found this quote:

“In the past, we have gotten lots of feedback from parents, teachers, and librarians about the content possibly not being appropriate for librarians.” (emphasis added.)

I was saddened to discover, after finding the original LA Times story, that nobody at Sports Illustrated said such a wonderfully foolish thing. Darn.

Beyonce Knowles, Beyonce, censorship, inappropriate, sports illustrated, swimsuit issue

I’ve been citing pieces of branding consultant james Torio’s master’s thesis for some time now. But because the thesis is long, and I want to cite a few small pieces, and those pieces aren’t directly URL addressable, I’m quoting them here. Clickable URLs are added, but everything else should be exactly as Torio wrote it. (Also related: Why There’s No Escaping The Blog and MSN Spaces Isn’t The Blogging Service For Me.)

In December 2004, Microsoft announced that it would also get into the Blogging business by offering MSN Spaces, software, which would enable Internet users to create Blogs. The next day Xeni Jardin a co-editor of the Blog Boing Boing, wrote an article entitled “7 Dirty Blogs.” Jardin wrote about titles of Blogs she tried to create using MSN Spaces, and how the built-in censor in Microsoft’s software reacted.

She was able to create a Blog entitled “World of Poop” and “Educational Smoking Crack: A How-To Guide for Teens.” The software would not allow her to create a Blog called “Pornography and the Law” or “Corporate Whore Chronicles.” According to David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth, “Within the first hour of Jardin’s post, five Blogs had linked to it, including the site of the widely read San Jose Mercury News columnist, Dan Gillmor. By the end of the day, there were dozens of Blogs pointing readers to ‘7 Dirty Blogs,’ with a proliferation of links that over the next few weeks topped 300. There were Italian Blogs and Chinese Blogs and Blogs in Greek, German, and Portuguese. There were Blogs with names like Tie-Dyed Brain Waves, Stubborn Like a Mule, and LibertyBlog. Each added its own tweak. ‘Ooooh, that’s what I want: a Blog that doesn’t allow me to speak my mind,’ wrote a Blogger called Kung Pow Pig. The conversation had clearly gotten out of Microsoft’s hands.”

The man who came to Microsoft’s rescue was Robert Scoble. He is a software evangelist for Microsoft who writes a Blog called the ”Scobleizer.“ According to Kirkpatrick and Roth, ”When it came to the criticism emanating from Boing Boing, Scoble simply agreed. “MSN Spaces isn’t the Blogging service for me,” he wrote. Nobody at Microsoft asked Scoble to comment; he just did it on his own, adding that he would make sure that the team working on “Spaces” was aware of the complaints. And he kept revisiting the issue on his Blog. As the anti-Microsoft crowd cried “censorship,” the nearly 4,000 Blogs linking to Scoble were able to see his running commentary on how Microsoft was reacting. “I get comments on my Blog saying, ‘I didn’t like Microsoft before, but at least they’re listening to us,’The Blog is the best relationship generator you’ve ever seen.” His famous boss agrees. “It’s all about openness,” said Chairman Bill Gates of Microsoft’s public Blogs like Scobleizer. “People see them as a reflection of an open, communicative culture that isn’t afraid to be self-critical.”

The following is an entry from the Blog gapingvoid.com about Robert Scoble entitled “TROGGING: Trust + Blogging i.e. ‘Using Blogs to build trust and transparency.’”

It occurs to me that my opinion of Microsoft has risen considerably in the last year. Not that I ever belonged to the “Bill Gates is Satan” crowd. I never was into computers enough to really care whether a guy in Redmond wrote the code, or some guy in Toledo. The same way I don’t really care who made my telephone or my microwave, so long as it works. It’s not an area where I project a lot of myself in to.

Still, there is something quite monolithic about Microsoft, and one always keeps an eyebrow raised when something gets that big, quite rightly.

So what happened? A new product? Nope. I still use the same Windows 98 and creaky, old Dell as always. Great new advertising campaign? Nope. Not watching much TV these days. Bill Gates gave all his money to cancer research? Nope. Not seen that much mention of him in the media recently.

What happened in there’s this guy called Robert Scoble who has a blog that I’ve been reading a lot this last 6-9 months. Robert works for Microsoft. Mark seems like a smart, honest, regular guy who holds down a job, same as the rest of us. He just happens to work for Microsoft. Robert writes about his job and his company the same way I would if I worked for them and liked my job. Informal, informed, friendly, it gives real insight about his company where possible- he tries to be as open and insightful as he can without disclosing trade secrets.

It other words, he seems sane, reasonable, trustworthy, human and somebody who knows what he’s talking about. Which to me helps make Microsoft seem likewise.

One guy and his blog, doing more real good for his company than any multimillion dollar ad agency campaign could ever hope to achieve.

As somebody in the ad business, I find the implications staggering.

Long live Robert Scoble, King of the Troggers!

Microsoft felt the backlash from the Blogosphere, and to their credit they did not issue press releases or create new advertisements for damage control, rather a Blogger who was objective joined in on the conversation; he worked with Microsoft’s customers and listened to what they had to say: building Microsoft’s brand equity. Blogs can be effective because of their transparency. Readers comment, enabling a conversation rather than a company sending a one-way message.

blog controversy, blogging, blogs are conversations, censorship, community relations, james torio, microsoft, MSN Spaces, PR, Robert Scoble, scobleizer

Regarding nudity in photographs posted to Flickr, dancharvey says:

Honestly, I’m more concerned about all the cats and flowers. Cliche is more damaging than breasts. Your opinion may vary.

nudity, censorship, flickr, photo, photography, top-v, argument, cliche, reason

Reuters: FEMA accused of censorship:

“It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression.

Brian Williams’ MSNBC Nightly News Blog:

While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. …a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads.

…the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome)…

[emphasis added --Casey]

Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo:

…it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the [New Orleans] situation is to cut off press access to report the story.

Photo credit: Reuters, published in Mainich Daily News’ Katrina photo special. Request: honor the Katrina dead and the lessons they can teach us, don’t hide from them. Don’t ignore them the way Bush did while they were still alive.

tags: brian williams, bush, bushh, catastrophe, censor, censor this, censor this!, censorship, dead bodies, death, fema, george bush, george w bush, government, government censors, government censorship, hurricane, hurricane katrina, joshua micah marshall, katrina, louisiana, media, msnbc nightly news, national guard, new orleans, nola, pen american center, shame, talking points memo, w

George Weller won a Pulitzer Prize, a Polk Award, and was named a Neimann Fellow during his fifty-some-odd year career during which he covered much of Europe and Asia for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News. Weller died in 2002 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that tells much of the 20th century’s events. His 1943 story about an appendectomy performed by navy pharmacist’s mate Wheeler Lipes in a submarine 120 feet below Pacific waters amid the concussive blasts of depth charges is legendary. But Weller also left mysteries, like his early reports from the ground in Nagasaki (geolocation) shortly after the US bombed it with the second nuclear device used in war. From his obit:

As U.S. forces neared Japan, MacArthur forbade correspondents to go ashore. Mr. Weller hired a Japanese rowboat to take him to Nagasaki, and the general retaliated by killing all 30,000 words Mr. Weller filed.

Others (one, two, three) are less generous and claim a government cover-up of the facts of nuclear weapons and fallout was the motive for burying the story. Whatever the reasons, Weller’s stories about Nagasaki never saw publication, and were thought lost until now.

Japan’s Mainichi Daily News reported yesterday that Weller’s 60-year old report has been discovered by his son who is still researching the files in Weller’s old apartment in San Felice Circeo, Italy (geolocation).

The stories had been typed and carbon-copied. The paper on which they had been printed had browned. The stories were typed out on about 75 pages and comprised some 25,000 words. There were also another 25 photos taken of Nagasaki soon after the bombing.

Weller’s reports included some of the first descriptions and photos of the then unknown effects of radiation.

“These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Unfevered patients with as much as one-third of the skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. They come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burns victims,” Weller wrote, adding that most of these patients died after no longer than five days.

– – –

Context: Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion tells of how the US government and military became very crafty with their use of the media to shape public opinion during the 20th century. According to Simpson, censorship and “information” campaigns were common and often leveraged the complicity of those in the media and academia.

tags: censorship, chicago daily news, george weller, governement censors, hiroshima and nagasaki, information campaign, nagasaki, new york times, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear device, nuclear weapon, radiation, radiation poisoning, radiation sickness