What makes BoingBoing so Cool
BoingBoing is the eclectic team blog made of popular science fiction writer Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, and John Battelle as the business manager. The core of the team is Cory, Xeni, and Mark with the occasional entry by David, and John. BoingBoing was the most popular blog in the world until May 10 2006 , and since then has floated near the top of the top 100 blogs list at Technorati . It is still very popular, but competition, the addition of other BoingBoing branded systems like BoingBoing TV as well as their own individual careers has influenced the success BoingBoing over the last few years.
BoingBoing has a unique niche in the market place, and has not been successfully copied by other bloggers. It receives about 1.5 million visitors each month , and it is the core team that adds to that uniqueness that makes BoingBoing the blog that it is, and as popular as it is. BoingBoing is a hard blog to describe, as it covers popular culture, DRM, censorship, and Cory Doctorow has deep ties to the EFF , (Electronic Freedom Fund), as well as too many other activist or populist people in the world. That is what makes the blog so interesting, is that you are always guaranteed to find something interesting along the way, regardless of the viewpoint that you are coming from. The blog either inspires or infuriates that is its charm, and part of the reason that BoingBoing has remained a top blog for many years.
Determining the winning formula for the blog is not very hard, there is a direct addressable concept here, and the group does not stray from it. BoingBoing covers what they cover, popular culture, DRM, censorship, and do it in a fun, poking the finger at the “man” style that is a wonderful approach and why it is so appealing is that you know you are reading real people. Their unique approach towards the subjects is more of a “Good, Bad, or Ugly” process, when something is good (as in the case of steam punk), bad (as in the case of DRM), or ugly (as in the case of censorware) you have no doubts as to where the writers stand and what they actually feel. You are reading real things that they think are interesting. You get a first person viewpoint into those things that they believe are important. They are also activist and populist in what they are talking about on the site.
The roots of BoingBoing are well established in print media, extending through to today’s electronic media. Originally, they started as a magazine during the heyday of the “zine culture” in the late 1980’s, and were able to reinvent themselves as a web site, and then eventually a blog. It is in the blog format that most of their readers know them in, as the zine is gone, and the original web site is only accessible through the wayback machine . The association that they have with federated media puts their popularity as one of the top five most visited websites in the world . With webby awards, and other honorable mentions, there are a number of advantages and a number of reasons why BoingBoing is as popular as it is.
1. Writing – all come from professional writing backgrounds, Xeni Jardin was a wired contributing writer, Cory Doctorow is a professional novelist, Mark Frauenfelder is an illustrator and writer, David Pescovitz is a writer, educator and works on other projects like Make Magazine. John Battelle is also a novelist , so the tradition of writing is well embedded in the site, and it shows all the way through what they do and what they write about at BoingBoing.
2. A deeply complex subject matter to write about as content, with an emphasis on public culture, DRM, intellectual property, and web censorship, these are all dynamic fast moving fields, that will not go stale for a very long time.
3. Deeply personal beliefs about what they write about, with the connections and the viewpoints that the writers for BoingBoing have, you know that they have opinions about issues, and intelligently discuss the issues that they are dealing with in their blog entries. You can easily tell opinion from fact, which is important for readers so that they can make their own decisions about a subject or issue.
4. Respected in their fields – all come from various backgrounds, but all are also well respected in their fields that they write about on their blog. All have had some form of personal involvement in the things that they write about, so they have a deep knowledge of the subject, and often use that deep knowledge to enhance, or add depth to the subject of discussion.
From the above points, it is easy to understand the success and popularity of BoingBoing. BoingBoing though has not been without its own share of controversy. The June 2008 episode where BoingBoing decided that they were going to and did remove all links to famed sex blogger Violet Blue was one controversy that erupted on to the blogosphere, that BoingBoing did not wish to discuss . While there are many rumors as to why BoingBoing did a self-censorship , the end of this is that many people do not know outside of BoingBoing, and Xeni Jardin has stated that they wanted the matter over.
There are also the problems with web filtering of BoingBoing content via SmartFilter and other filters that happened in 2006. To combat the filtering of BoingBoing for whatever reason from groups like SmartFilter, a regular BoingBoing reader named Mark Christian developed the “distributed BoingBoing” project , which essentially is a PHP powered script that would pull the front page only from BoingBoing, from any server in the world. A user would host the script on a server, a user who would otherwise be censored from going to BoingBoing would be able to go to any server on the distributed list , and pull up a copy of the front page of BoingBoing, but not go any further into the BoingBoing site. BoingBoing heavily supported the project , along with around 100 server sites around the world to ensure free access to BoingBoing regardless of the state of censorship that a person had at work, or at home. The controversy ended up with an OP ED in the New York Times written by Xeni Jardin and the ACLU taking on the case to SmartFilter’s use in public libraries. A little over a year later, the use of Distributed BoingBoing was still going strong globally .
Along with BoingBoing’s guide to defeating censor ware , it is unlikely that BoingBoing will ever back away from difficult issues that take on the things that they most care about censorship, intellectual property, and showing the eclectic side of the world. The blog is successful because of the quality of the writing, the diversity of the subject matter that they have chosen to discuss, as well as the ability to manage controversy around them, or around the subject matter that they discuss. It is the ability to write well, manage controversy, as well as be consistent with the messages they deliver that has defined BoingBoing. BoingBoing as a blog will be around for a long time as they already have many years of being available to an audience that grows as each person discovers them, and internalizes what they are writing about on their blog.
tags: boom and bust in the blogosphere, book, review, boingboing, history, cool, controversy, blog, blogging, blogger
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