"Did you sleep with Violet Blue? I can't keep track," my editor IM'd me. He's not nosy; he's just trying to stay on top of things. To help him — and you — out, I've dashed off this sex map of l'affaire Boing Boing, including my own involvement. (Why didn't Xeni Jardin just do this in the first place? In retrospect, that seems easier than taking the abuse she's now getting.) Jardin thinks blogging one's personal life is "stupid," but then, I get to report for an operation where my seriously gay editor factchecks the difference between "lesbian" and "girl-on-girl." And if we're fucking the people we're reporting on, we'll tell you. So no, I did not sleep with Violet Blue. Even though she asked.

What turned culture-jamming tech blog Boing Boing into the kind of censorious monster it normally ridicules? Beyond its initial statement that the reasons are "personal," Boing Boing hasn't elaborated, but all signs point to the foundering of a once-romantic friendship between Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue, the sex blogger whose many links from Boing Boing were erased last year. (Full disclosure: Jardin is Valleywag's favorite gendertastic sex-robot space princess from the future, while Violet Blue has contributed to Fleshbot, a porn blog published by Valleywag owner Gawker Media. Blue once approached Valleywag contributor Melissa Gira Grant for sex, but was rebuffed.) In an email to Valleywag, pasted below, Blue continues to profess ignorance of what she did wrong; she also dismisses her entanglement with Jardin as a friendship laced with casual sex. Blue's own photo of the two at Kink.com party, shown here, suggests, in its entangled limbs, that the relationship was more serious than that.

As new media gets big, it remains small at heart - and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" - though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle - Boing Boing's "band manager" - a multimillionaire. Oh, and did we mention that Violet Blue, the sex blogger in question (and contributor to Gawker Media's Fleshbot), shown here at right, used to be the lover of Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, left?

Internet freedom advocates—a group that includes just about every blogger—are up in arms at the revelation that Boing Boing, the incredibly popular this-and-that blog, has purged its archives of all the works of Violet Blue, a blogger who also contributes to Gawker sex site Fleshbot. The reason for the disappearance is unclear; but whatever it is, it can't fit in well with Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow's free speech crusading. But you can file it under one of the great universal truths: Media People (of all stripes) Are Touchier Than Anybody.

Violet Blue, a popular local blogger, columnist, sex educator and contributor to Gawker Media's smutty sister Fleshbot, seems to have rubbed someone at Boing Boing the wrong way. She discovered that nearly all the posts on the site that mentioned her or her work had disappeared - save for one, a post from last year on the Top 10 Sex Memes from 2006. Shortly after that post was discovered via Google site search, it disappeared as well.

Google has reportedly turned over the necessary information to identify an Orkut user who wrote "I hate Sonia Ghandi." The Indian government had the name of the perpetrator, Rahul Vaid, but Google provided the IP address that pinpointed his location. This is not the first time Google has helped a foreign government go after its own citizens. After the jump, Boing Boing TV filmed the art pranksters from the Billboard Liberation Front and Monochrom teaming up to help Google advertise their close relationship with the ruling Chinese Communist Party's Internet censors — on the day of Google's annual shareholder meeting, no less. "Do no evil" seems pretty darn flexible if you're a moral relativist with profitable interests in international markets.

Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million.

Boing Boing, the most popular blog for all other blogs to steal fun stories from, ruled Internet conversation about weird distracting things until sites like Digg came along. Now that it's no longer the first place to find a meme, the site is even cooler (which I blame on the authors' dedication to posting whatever the hell they want). One of those four authors, Cory Doctorow, has started blogging at an IBM-sponsored blog about how he, like, never needs to check his e-mail and doesn't even read the Internet any more.

Portfolio, which Condé Nast started because there were no other credulous business magazines, has a story on why media companies should buy blogs, which is of course entirely wrong. Here's why Gawker Media, TechCrunch, Boing Boing and every other blog making over a million dollars should never be for sale.

Why let your abandonment of this mortal coil prevent you from continuing to be a self-impressed techno-utopian schmuck? Now you can alert the world that you read BoingBoing ever after death with the "Public Domain Donor" sticker. Put it on your license today so that when you die your Twitter will revert to the Public Domain where fellow Twitterers may build upon it with further Twittering. [Public Domain Donor via Kottke]

• Point Break and heartbreak [BoingBoing TV]

————————— Introducing BBtv vlogs! Today: Joel from BB Gadgets. It's been a little more than two months since we launched Boing Boing tv, and we've decided that producing a daily internet show just isn't enough. Meet BBtv vlogs!

Is the Onion still funny, or have you just gotten used to reading it so you haven't seen it decline from its '90s heyday to the pool of mediocrity it is today? How about Boing Boing, McSweeney's, CNN.com, or Perez Hilton? It's time to feel bad about what you like, for that is the path to enlightenment, or at least to not being that dink who IMs me month-old jokes about Bush.