The Story of Jimmy Wales and Bomis Babes

In an interview with Wired News, Wikipedia leader Jimmy Wales renewed his objection to the statement that Bomis Babes was pornographic:

If R-rated movies are soft porn, it was porn. In other words, no, it was not. That description is inaccurate.

If you're not exceptionally proud of the erotic web site you ran before the dot-com bust, a defense that hinges on the definition of soft pornography probably won't help matters.

As someone who grew up after cable television and before the web, I thought "soft porn" described the late-night movies on pay cable that stop your channel surfing dead in its tracks. "Look, Shannon Tweed caught a burglar and now she's giving her a hot-oil massage!"

It's tough to judge Bomis Babes fairly, because at some point it was removed from the web along with the Internet Archive cache and other not-porn on the site. I know this because I did a comprehensive Google image search last night on the term Bomis looking for smut, clicking through page after page of results.

And people say bloggers don't do any original reporting. My right wrist is killing me.

The Bomis Babes homepage now contains nothing but the message "Hi, mom!" I could find only one babe -- the site's 404 error page contains porn actress Sylvia Saint in a company T-shirt.

Saint appears on the Bomis entry of the French and Luxembourgian editions of Wikipedia. The picture was released with Wales' consent, as he acknowledged in a 2003 Wikipedia edit:

Bomis owns the copyright to that photo, and while we don't release all of our promotional photos under the GNU FDL, that one is fine. I always wonder what happened to the photo of Aria Giovanni on my Ferrari. Hmm ... the mysteries of Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, Giovanni is an actress who posed on a Ferrari given away by Bomis in 2000 (though the winner reportedly took cash instead). "She has gained particular respect for being among relatively few large-chested models working in the field who have not undergone cosmetic surgery."

The last vestiges of Bomis Babes on the web are several hundred thumbnail images and cached pages that haven't disappeared from Google yet. (Some may be excluded by Google SafeSearch.)

My guess is that Bomis Babes depicted nude models comparable to Playboy magazine, so it would be smut by the standards of the American Family Association but not the Clinton administration. But Bomis was eagerly associating itself with porn stars, stuffing them in poorly sized company T-shirts and filing reports from events such as the 2003 Adult Entertainment Expo:

There was lots of cleavage at the show. We just happen to like Stormy's the best.

Brian Lamb asked Wales about Bomis content in a Sept. 24, 2005, C-Span interview:

LAMB: Well, what's the dirty picture thing?

WALES: Well, Bomis is -- it's a search engine so there's all kinds of content on there. And Bomis always had a market similar to say Maxim magazine. So it's kind of a guy-oriented search engine. But, yes, no. The story is much exaggerated by -- through history so.

LAMB: So ...

WALES: Something I struggle with constantly by the ...

LAMB: At some point somebody said you drove a Hyundai but then there was a parenthesis around it, no, he actually has a Ferrari.

WALES: Well, I do actually have a Ferrari. It doesn't work at the moment and my Ferrari cost less than most people's SUVs.

Update: I suggested a compromise to end a ferocious war of the editors currently taking place on Wikipedia about whether Bomis Babes was porn.

Journalism · Wikipedia · 2005/12/20 · 16 COMMENTS · Link

Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for Number 1

I spent a little time this morning expanding the Wikipedia biography of Gordon Keith, a dark-humored and hilarious radio host on the Dallas sportstalk station KTCK.

Having a biography in Wikipedia is a double-edged sword, as John Siegenthaler Sr. can attest. You get the perks of being in an encyclopedia at the peril that any crank in the world can contribute unflattering or libelous things to it. When I added my own biography in a misguided experiment last August, I didn't realize that some people fight as hard to get out of Wikipedia as others do to get in. I check my entry occasionally to see if anyone has added the reason I was told never to return to Bentley College by a police officer on the night of Jan. 4, 1986.

Who am I kidding? I check it every single day.

Another person obsessively monitoring his own biography is Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who has edited it frequently, removing references to a credited "co-founder" of the encyclopedia and obscuring the nature of a pornographic web site he once published.

Though some Wikipedia editors believe that it's always wrong to edit subjects in which you are involved, this idea is clearly not shared by Wales. The edit history of his biography reveals that he's made 18 changes with the account Jimbo Wales, most recently on Dec. 2.

On seven different occasions, Wales has altered sentences that gave Larry Sanger credit for cofounding Wikipedia. Sanger, a former employee of Wales whose job was eliminated in 2002, led the project as "chief organizer" from its January 2001 launch and gave the site its name. He described himself as Wikipedia's cofounder in a 2004 Kuro5hin article.

Wales does not share this view.

On Oct. 28, 2005, he changed the text "Wales and Sanger set up Wikipedia" to "Wales set up Wikipedia." He made the change again later that day and repeated it on Nov. 9 and Dec. 1 -- other editors kept putting language back in that credited Sanger.

On Dec. 2, Wales revised "Sanger initially came up with the idea to make the encylopedia wiki-based" to "Jeremy Rosenfeld initially came up with the idea to make the encylopedia wiki-based." He also replaced a line crediting Rosenfeld with the idea for the name, changing it to "Sanger coined the name 'wikipedia'."

Wales used the editors' talk page of his biography to complain about efforts to credit Sanger with the site's founding:

I was there, and I know the history. I set up Wikipedia. I fixed the broad outlines of early policy, and Larry worked under my direct supervision at every stage of the process. The current article, even with my edits, contains considerable incorrect editorialization, it's just that I don't even know where to begin in correcting it.

Another sore spot for Wales has been Bomis Babes, a now-closed subscription service of his company's Bomis.Com search portal that offered nude pictures of women. The site, whose cache used to be viewable on Internet Archive, has been described as "softcore pornography," "pornography," or "erotica" by Wikipedia editors.

Wales changed "Bomis Babes softcore pornography section" to "Bomis Babes adult content section" on Sept. 4 and twice removed references to the nature of the site, replacing "Bomis Babes erotica section" with "Bomis Babes blog based on Slashdcode" (Oct. 20) and "Bomis Babes pornography section with a blog based on Slashcode" to "Bomis Babes blog based on Slashcode" (Oct. 28). (Apparently, it's what's on the inside of a web site that counts.)

When his Sept. 4 edit was removed, Wales reinstated it later that day and put this comment on the edit: "Please do not change it back without consulting with me personally."

Commercial depictions of naked women are not pornography, Wales declared on his biography's talk page:

The correct terminology is 'adult content'. If this is pornography, then so is much of mainstream culture. I do not think we should adopt the definitions of the Taliban or the Southern Baptist Convention.

Update: Larry Sanger responded to this article on Wikipedia:

I must say I am amused. Having seen edits like this, it does seem that Jimmy is attempting to rewrite history. But this is a futile process because in our brave new world of transparent activity and maximum communication, the truth will out.

Sanger's working on Digital Universe, a rival to Wikipedia that will employ experts to review user-submitted content.

Update 2: More on Bomis Babes.

Wikipedia · Journalism · 2005/12/19 · 61 COMMENTS · Link

Blogger Returns to New Orleans

Michael Barnett, the computer network administrator who barricaded himself in the central business district after the storm, has returned to New Orleans.

After his first week back, Barnett was extremely pessimistic about the city's condition:

It has been a week now, and I've had a chance to drive all around the city. All I can say is that this place is broken down. Crushed. Demolished. It is a moral lapse of the first order for politicians to keep telling people to come back. I am going to take some flack for telling the truth, but since that's what this blog is for, that's what I'm going to do. New Orleans is a wasteland. Sure, there are a lot of contractors out there trying to clean up, but it's barely making a dent.

Hurricane Katrina · 2005/12/14 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Podcasting: You're Soaking In It!

Jewish lesbian shock jock Madge Weinstein kicked my "S" yesterday during a 10-minute rant about Adam Curry's role in podcasting:

You gotta realize, and I didn't realize this until I started getting more popular with my podcasts, when people blog ---- -- ----, did I spill my water? no -- when people blog ---- -- I'm resting the microphone on my fat, now. You're going to get mike noise, I'm sorry, and it's going to be all bad. This is bad. You know, it's all bad. When people blog things a lot of times they blog it because they think a lot of people will read it, and it's as simple as that. And I think that's what Rogers Cadenhead did, the man with the extra S ...

I've attached her rant as a podcast, naturally. The actual audio doesn't contain Arthur Fiedler's theme from The Longest Day. I added it to test my theory that all podcasts would sound better with patriotic background music.

Wikipedia · Podcasts · Podcasting · 2005/12/13 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Podcasting: Accept No Imitations

Randall Stross, New York Times, July 3, 2005:

"Podcast" is an ill-chosen portmanteau that manages to be a double misnomer. A podcast does not originate from an iPod. And it is not a broadcast sent out at a particular time for all who happen to receive it.

Steven Chen, China Daily, Sept. 8, 2005:

The term podcast, a portmanteau of two words, broadcasting and iPod, Apple Computer's now ubiquitous music player is something of a misnomer, since such files do not need either an iPod or a portable MP3 player to be played ...

Wikipedia's podcasting entry, Nov. 30, 2005:

"Podcasting" is a portmanteau that combines the words "iPod" and "broadcasting." The term is a misnomer since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable player, and no broadcasting is required.

Chris Noon, Forbes.Com article, Dec. 7, 2005:

A "podcast" is at once a portmanteau; derived from the words "broadcasting" and "iPod", and a misnomer; neither podcasting nor podcast listening requires an iPod, and no broadcasting is really required. Even so, portmanteaux and misnomers are not precluded from appearing in the dictionary; hence the word's selection as the Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

The next word of the year should be originality.

Journalism · Podcasting · Wikipedia · 2005/12/12 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Congress Studies Cruise Ship Disappearances

On Tuesday, two Congressional subcommittees will hold a joint hearing on the subject of cruise ship disappearances and crimes that take place aboard the vessels.

My wife M.C. Moewe, a reporter with the Jacksonville Business Journal, spent six months tracking down information on cruise ship passengers who disappeared or went overboard, an elusive subject because most incidents happen in international waters or foreign jurisdictions. She found 12 passengers since 2000, including five within the preceding year. Though the majority are believed to be suicides -- anyone who looks over the rail of an oceangoing ship knows you could disappear forever in those waters -- clues suggest that a few, horribly enough, might be homicides.

Since then, the number has grown to at least 17, including Jill Begora, 59, a Canadian woman who vanished Saturday before the 2,100-passenger Royal Caribbean Jewel of the Seas arrived in Nassau, Bahamas.

Moewe will be traveling to Washington to cover the hearing. I'm hoping that when C-Span posts tomorrow's full TV schedule at around 5 p.m. today, the hearing will be one of the events they televise. I want to record for posterity the moment at which she became too big-time to associate with her husband the blogger.

I love reporters who poke around the byzantine bureaucracy of Washington, looking for overlooked stories while their peers are hanging out in the White House hoping the president gives them a nickname. I wanted to be I.F. Stone when I grew up.

Since her original story ran in June, Moewe keeps getting contacted about the subject. She's heard from four TV news producers, one family member of passengers, and two guests on ships where incidents occurred.

Tomorrow's hearing was called by Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, who knew George Allen Smith IV, a 26-year-old honeymooner whose July disappearance from another Royal Caribbean vessel is being investigated by the FBI.

Journalism · Jacksonville · Florida · 2005/12/12 · 29 COMMENTS · Link

Mena Trott Declares Civil War

In a keynote address at the Les Blogs conference yesterday, Six Apart founder Mena Trott cut short her call for blogger civility to put a bleep in his place:

Who is dotBen? All day yesterday you've been an ------- to the people who've been in this town and I want to know why don't you, why, what the ----?

It's hard to fairly judge the situation without seeing the events that led up to it, but that's never stopped me before. Trott showed courage giving a speech at the Six Apart-organized conference in front of screen that projected live online chat, a relatively new phenomenon called a backchannel, but I agree with the point Ben Metcalfe seemed to be making when dragged in front of the whole class -- you can't always be nice if you're being honest.

The comments Shel Israel made right before the confrontation are pretty funny in retrospect:

It's a different world now and it's a new way of expressing things. It's a much faster world we live in, so I guess we got to live with it and every story has two points of view and we have to listen sometimes to see what other people think.

Update: Here's a longer excerpt of Trott's speech (and the transcript), which she intended in part as a challenge to backchannel behavior:

I started to get incredibly nervous about appearing on this stage today. ... The main reason I was scared and I'm still scared, is that IRC backchannel. ... I've seen people make comments on these channels that they would never say to somebody's face.

Movable Type · Civility · 2005/12/07 · 31 COMMENTS · Link

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