Xeni Jardin is the BoingBoing blogger who recently admitted that she deleted (or as she keeps insisting, “unpublished,” as if there’s a difference) all references to her former friend Violet Blue. Somewhere between 70-100 posts, depending on who you believe, were all flushed down the Memory Hole. Even if a post only mentioned VB in passing, down it went.

Was this the result of a nasty romantic breakup? Or something more mundane, like an intellectual disagreement over trademark law? So far, nobody involved is saying. Here’s as specific as Xeni has been willing to get, as she told the LA Times:

It’s hard for me to articulate exactly how weird this is. Suddenly it became this big huge thing with all this public scrutiny and all this speculation. But at the time I just wanted to take this material down for a host of reasons that I don’t want to talk about in public because I don’t think it would do this person any good. We don’t blog in detail about every minute decision we make about what to publish and what not to.

…There wasn’t an attempt to hide it. And I didn’t bring it up again in part because it involved some personal, private stuff that I don’t tend to get into. Like whether someone’s character is this or that, or whatever kind of personal dirty laundry was involved.

Oh, okay! She’s actually doing Violet Blue a favor by letting people speculate about what this “personal dirty laundry” might be. She’s respecting VB’s privacy.

You know who else probably wishes Xeni had respected his privacy? Tomo Foote-Lennox. Back in 2006, he ran afoul of Jardin when the Internet content filtering software created by his company, Secure Computing, blocked BoingBoing in several Middle Eastern countries and at several U.S. corporations. Why, that’s censorship! So Xeni had no problem reporting that “numerous blogs were saying” Foote-Lennox had once posted to a Usenet newsgroup for adult baby fetishists. Here’s how Xeni couched it, in a BoingBoing post that has since been mysteriously unpublished deleted but can still be found at archive.org:

Much of the debate focuses on whether having allegedly participated in “diaper-lover” culture, as infant fetishists describe themselves, would disqualify someone from passing judgment over what online content children or adults are allowed to see.

We’re skeptical of this here at Boing Boing. We believe the problem isn’t that people allegedly into unusual sexual stuff have no business setting standards for others. The real problem: is anyone qualified to tell other adults — entire nations at a time — what they can and can’t access online?

Yeah, it’s not about what a consenting adult likes to do in his or her spare time. It’s not about interfering with the ad revenue of a blogger who can mobilize a lot of readers very quickly to dig up dirt on you. It’s about the higher principle. People should be able to access the information they want online.

Well, unless you want to access the BoingBoing posts that mentioned Violet Blue. That you don’t get to decide for yourself. And you don’t get to know why. Because it’s private.

Oh, and guess who dug up that “adult baby” connection? You’ll never guess.

“Who cares?” complaints can be left in the comments. Keep in mind that this whole BoingBoing debaclebacle has been covered in not just the LA Times but also the NY Times, CNBC, the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Chicago Tribune, and even G4. So I’m not the only one who stinks. As blogs grow more popular and powerful, we’re likely to see more stories like these.

(Hat tip to waraw and CCBC at Metafilter, as well as domoni.com)