Ampersand has sold a portion of his domain to a search-engine-trafficker who provides links and traffic to pornographic website. Because Ampersand is part of the feminist (and anti-unfeminist) blogging community, and because a number of them believe ha…

Which makes it sound like you had no intention of actually copping to this fact except that the proverbial cat was already out the bag. Frankly, I think this is largely hairsplitting. You imply that amptoons will not be supporting p0rn and then go on to hedge your bets.

Motivations aside, it’s still poor form in my mind.

I remember reading Barry’s initial announcement and wondered why it was so important that he explicitly state the new owner of his website would never put porn ads on Amptoons.com.

I’m sure that this is just an honest mistake, not a deliberate lie - but it would have been nice for you to include a link to the post in question, so that your readers could check it out for themselves. Not only did I not “explicitly state” that, I said exactly the opposite; I pointed out that the new owner was putting porn ads on amptoons.com. Here’s the paragraph you’re referring to:

I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site. But beyond that, I have no ability to control what the buyer does with his pages - the deal is that he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property. And - as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed - some pages I don’t own include links to porn.

I don’t think that’s deceptive. I see a couple of readers have suggested that maybe I didn’t realize he’d be including porn links on his pages, but it didn’t occur to me that people could take it that way when I wrote the above paragraph. To claim that I ever “explicitly stated” that the new owner wouldn’t put on porn ads is simply untrue.

Also, I haven’t sold my blog; I and the other writers remain the owners of all our own material, the new owner has no editorial say, no right to post, no right to censor our posts, etc..

I spoke to one of my co-bloggers before I made the sale, and informed a second before I made the news public; the two I spoke two were the two I thought would be most likely to object. But you’re right; in retrospect, I should have emailed all the co-bloggers and guest-bloggers before the sale happened. I’ll email them all now.