PLEASE NOTE: This story has been updated/resolved (see below)…Boing Boing still totally rocks.
I love Boing Boing and have for some time, which is why I need some help with some BB-related confusion I am having:
Since its inception, BoingBoing.net has been "a directory of wonderful things". The site’s gifted blog team–Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, and David Pescovitz–have consistently delivered the goods for 5+ years, and have undoubtedly inspired legions of devotees and imitators.
Even as media guru John Battelle got involved, and the site expanded to incorporate advertising to "cover costs", they still stayed pretty faithful to the Wonderful notion….ads on the site are all products that the site’s proprietors would seem to think are pretty Wonderful in their own right. When I contacted the site about an advertising campaign for a client of mine, they even told me that "We plan to only take ads from
companies we think are wonderful".
So far, so good. Great new media company attempting to establish an exceptionally high standard for its advertisers. And they’ve done quite well for themselves in the process. Bravo, that’s great. But here’s where I start to get a little confused.
Back in February, Boing Boing published a link to a Declan McCullaugh article on News.com, about True.com and its CEO, Herb Vest, who was trying to get legislation passed to force dating sites to specify whether or not the people listed have undergone background checks (Mr. Vest’s True.com DOES perform background checks). While they didn’t specifically comment on the story, one would presume, based on their typical libertarian bent, especially when it comes to all things digital (after all, site founder Cory Doctorow is European Outreach Coordinator for EFF), that they’d be opposed to this sort of legislation of the online dating space.
Again, I stress–at the time this was posted, Xeni Jardin, who posted it, did NOT comment on the proposed legislation–she just linked to Declan’s article.
Is it not reasonable for readers to interpret Boing Boing’s excerpting of McCulluagh’s story as some endorsement of the article’s anti-legislative tone? That being the case, is there not room for some confusion about their inclusion of True.com as a Wonderful advertiser?
This reader would like to know what True.com did in March 2005, short of signing a Boing Boing ad contract, to escalate to Wonderful status?
Or did I misinterpret that Xeni post of the Declan story? Was she just posting what she thought was another example of awesome legislative assaults on Internet creativity and innovation?
UPDATE 1 (Wednesday afternoon): I sent this post to the good people over at Boing Boing, and they’ve already contacted me and told me they’re working on a resolution. I will keep you posted on how it works out.
UPDATE 2 (Friday afternoon): The True.com ads are gone from Boing Boing. They contacted me and let me know they f*cked up, and thanked me for pointing it out. And most importantly, they dumped the advertiser within a day or so of when I pointed it out to them. So hooray for Team Boing Boing, for working hard (i.e. responding swiftly to one person’s comment, turning down an advertiser with cash in hand) to preserve the Wonderfulness of their fine Directory.