For generations, people and institutions have had second thoughts about decisions: Stock exchanges delist companies, higher courts overrule lower ones, tennis players replay a disputed point, celebrities reinvent their personalities.
On the Internet, however, we have the technology to act more comprehensively: specifically, to unpublish. One moment there is material on a Web site, the next moment it is gone, and in such a way that nobody would guess it had existed.
Unpublishing from a Web site certainly is not uncommon, particularly after a lawyer sends a letter demanding it. And on obscure personal blogs presumable it happens all the time -- a writer simply may have a change of heart.
But when one popular Web site, Boing Boing, recently unpublished all references to a blogger named Violet Blue, some of its readers treated the decision as a step of utmost consequence, even though it took place about a year ago. A discussion thread on the site, at boingboing.net, has grown to more than 1,400 messages.
The issues here are larger than the material itself, which amounted to at least 70 or so posts by one of the site's contributors, Xeni Jardin, in which she referred to the writings of Blue, who is the weekly sex columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle and a former friend of Jardin. (For the number of posts, I stand on the shoulders of David Sarno of The Los Angeles Times Web Scout blog, who has tracked the dispute attentively.)
In this case, what looks like a personal spat has turned into a cautionary tale, one that reflects the odd and influential community that has grown around Boing Boing. The site, which began as a fanzine in the early 1990s, calls itself "a directory of wonderful things," and its readers can appear particularly intense. Theirs is the intensity that...

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