Sure, but we expect transparency and particular ethical standards from institutions such as the press and the state because we recognize the power that they wield; it’s not clear how all blogs can reasonably fall into this context. Some blogs are influential, certainly, but this should hardly lead to categorical judgments about what’s proper for all bloggers. If blogging is the diverse and democratic medium that we say it is, then let’s acknowledge that people blog for reasons that are too various to be governed under any single standard.

(Let’s also acknowledge that not everybody who revises, edits, or reworks their writing needs to adorn their changes with UPDATE notices or INS tags.)

I wanted the person in my rearview mirror as fast as possible. Bringing up the deletion of the posts, in a new post to justify the action, would have provoked further confrontation.

I don’t know what provoked Boing Boing to unwonderful Violet Blue. But I can understand why they were attracted to the idea of deleting her from the site without comment to avoid the kind of drama we’re seeing now.

Maybe if I’m smart about this I can also do something to tie archive.org in there.

I’ve long thought that part of being a good net citizen is not breaking links. I may have done so a few times inadvertently, but the last time I knowingly broke a link was 1999, when the domain that hosted my original web pages decided to re-organize and I no longer had control over those pages. I recreated them in the same structure on my own server, and emailed all the people I could find who linked to them.

BoingBoing’s current behavior is uncivil, and, more even than old domains that link rot into spammer juice, this is motivating me to deal with ten years worth of links in blog archives.

The easiest way to avoid continuing to endorse the clown was to delete the entries.

Or add an update, with links to a subsequent post reflecting your ideas and feelings about the old posts? At least in that event you’re adding to a narrative, linking further.

If content management tools are in place to support revisioning, so that changes can be tracked like Wikipedia updates, that’s the ideal.

But for the vast majority of people whose blogs are personal, non-commercial forms of expression that lack such tools, I don’t think it’s fair to expect us to keep entries online forever.

I’ve deleted a few blog entries that were expressions of support for a former business partner who threatened to sue me. It felt a little weird sending that stuff to the memory hole, but most web users aren’t going to treat old blog entries as stuff that might no longer be true. The easiest way to avoid continuing to endorse the clown was to delete the entries.

If I had been as vocal an advocate of transparency as the Boing Boing crew, I would’ve been more reluctant to do it.

[ETA: as of 07/02/2008, I no longer endorse this website. Justification here.]

I think the problem is less with removing the links and more with removing everything around them. I don’t even care about the fact that it was Boing Boing, I just think that any blogger should be transparent about the changes they make to their archives.