An ABC reporter went off on Joe Scarborough; Julia Allison asked if she could be mean if she felt like it and a Twitter-less vacation proved hard to start. The Twitterati just had to get in one last dig.

The Twitterati weren't themselves: Caroline McCarthy was mistaken for airline staff; a Guardian writer turned into one of the Stepford Wives and a professional tattoo aficionado found himself destroying art.

Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets is shocked, shocked that the team working on Google Earth, Google's 3D interactive world map, launched a mobile app for the iPhone before writing one for Google's Android operating system, which now runs on all of one clunky phone sold by T-Mobile, the also-ran of the U.S. wireless market. He calls the decision "inexplicable." I don't think it's hard to understand at all: Google Earth programmers actually want people to use their app, rather than have gadget bloggers write posts celebrating their clever strategery.

Boing Boing's readers, hopped up on free-speech rhetoric, continue to find the tech-culture blog's act of unpublishing unspeakable. Hoping to put the Internet's most enduring drama llama this month to bed, the Los Angeles Times rounded up four members of Boing Boing's staff yesterday for a late-night confab. The result is transcribed here and there, but for those about to launch into a three-day weekend, we salute you with only the most wonderful bits, perfect for around-the-barbeque reblogging. It is at once brilliant and brain-numbing in its inconclusiveness. But if the answer to bad speech is more speech, why not answer an act of unpublishing with more nonwords?

————————— Introducing BBtv vlogs! Today: Joel from BB Gadgets. It's been a little more than two months since we launched Boing Boing tv, and we've decided that producing a daily internet show just isn't enough. Meet BBtv vlogs!

Thomas Crampton, a former International Herald Tribune reporter turned extremely amateur videoblogger, cornered spunky Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow to discuss how to be a better blogger at a conference in China. Doctorow's advice was rather straightforward: Write headlines as if you work for a newswire so search engines can figure out what you're writing about. (We wish he had offered Crampton advice on shooting video interviews instead — or rather, how to pick up a laptop and type notes for a written blog entry, so search engines can figure out what your interviewee is talking about.) But Doctorow couldn't resist a competitive swipe at Gizmodo, the gadgets blog Boing Boing is now taking on.

Does the world need yet another gadget blog? Probably not, but if we must endure one, it might as well be from Boing Boing, the venerable protoblog and "directory of wonderful things." While Boing Boing has featured a plethora of oddball gadgets over the years, its editors' tastes run to the esoteric. Boing Boing Gadgets, run by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson, promises to mix the offbeat with the mainstream. (Gizmodo, like Valleywag, is owned by Gawker Media.) Just one question: Does this bode an unseating for Dethroner, Johnson's own "lifestyle" blog?

LOCKHART STEELE — Joel Johnson is one of my favorite bloggers. He helmed Gawker gadget blog Gizmodo for a few years, then oversaw all the Gawker tech sites before departing this past summer (damn him) for the greener pastures of Wired's website, where he's again managing bloggers (poor fool).