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More Bounce-Back than a Rubber Ball
After Alt.culture magazine BoingBoing loses its print home, it finds a new domain on the Web

by Ruta Rimas

BoingBoing Logo
courtesy of BoingBoing.net

Aroma therapeutic cell phones and blue-skinned senators are commonplace for the not-so-common BoingBoing, a weblog version of the now-defunct print 'zine BoingBoing. Browsing BoingBoing, over 6,000 fringe-culture addicts, science fiction nuts, and tech news junkies satisfy their craving for off the wall information such as how to obtain the plastic William Shatner bobble-head, a small statue with a giant bouncing face, or the new THC, the chemical found in marijuana, suppository for cancer patients.

The concept of BoingBoing, the self-proclaimed "directory of wonderful things," arose in 1988, when Mark Frauenfelder, an illustrator, author, and ukulele obsessive, along with his wife, the writer Carla Sinclair, started BoingBoing as a print 'zine about "pop culture and fun with technology." The 'zine was a hit, attracting many fans. At one point circulation was up to 17,000. Though ultimately the 'zine fell victim to its distributor's bankruptcy, Frauenfelder refused to let BoingBoing die, so he moved it online, where BoingBoing was reborn as a weblog.

Frauenfelder, and his fellow editors Electronic Frontier Foundation activist and freelance author, Cory Doctorow, and David Pescovitz, writer of the "Reality Check" column for Wired, scour the web daily and post links to "stories that are naughty, interesting, and true." But its not just the articles posted on BoingBoing that are interesting. This "oddball museum where everyone can be a curator" provides a forum for its readers. While one set of readers discusses glow in the dark pasteries, another group battles the question of medical marijuana. Some of BoingBoing's most influential forum posters, like Danny O'Brien, a co-editor of NTK.net, and Quinn Norton, who runs Ambiguous.org , are invited by the BoingBoing editors to wrie a guest blog.

The site does not generate any revenue, aside from the pocket change that people donate to the site through the online payment service, Paypal. Nonetheless, the blog is a success to its editors. BoingBoing maintains its steady readership of over 6,000 with its stay-true attitude. "It would be too hard to cater to an invisible audience, so we make something that we love. People know when you are bullshitting them. You have to have some philosophy that you are passionate about."

It was Frauenfelder's insatiable curiosity and investigative-reporting chops, honed while an editor at Wired magazine, that solved the mystery of the high-tech invention known as "Ginger/IT." In January 2001, when the media was buzzing with news of Dean Kamen's invention that, it was rumored, would "revolutionize the world," Frauenfelder simply looked up the patent and posted a link to it on BoingBoing. CNN got word of the expose, broadcast the news(and who had cracked the mystery) and that day, BoingBoing's hitcount went from four hundred to five thousand, throwing the obscure site into the media spotlight.

Although he misses the print version of the magazine, Frauenfelder appreciates the immediacy and instantaneous feedback of the online version of BoingBoing. Doctorow views BoingBoing as an interactive diary of sorts-a journal in which to jot down his thoughts, with the world looking on. "Having a weblog is better than having a notebook," says Doctorow. "I have other people annotating my thoughts." Says Frauenfelder, "it's the power of one collective brain."

Related links:

Craphound.com

Blogger.com

Pesco.net

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Ginger/IT Patent

Ukulelia: Your Passport to Four-Stringed Paradise

Ruta Rimas is an undergraduate studying journalism and metropolitan studies at New York University.

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