You don’t need a tetanus shot to sift through the bric-a-brac stockpiled at Boing Boing.
Instead of rusty antiques, this virtual street market offers a bevy of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. Or, as the creators call it: “A directory of wonderful things.”

At the popular search engine for user-generated media Technorati, Boing Boing is ranked as the most popular blog, with statistics saying it is visited by 1.75 million people every day. It won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog award at the 2005 Bloggies, the weblog awards.

Boing Boing’s recipe is a mix of serious, curious, trendy and trashy posts and links galore. The massive amount of content belies the short list authors: Mark, Cory, David, Xeni and John. How this cast of first-name-only characters comes up with its material is a mystery, as all of them are very active writers. Most of them contribute to Wired magazine and maintain their own blogs while still everyday managing to find the time to scout out an incredible variety of content for Boing Boing.

Boing Boing began, in 1988, as a magazine. Founders Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair turned it into a website in 1995. The archive dates back to January 2000, year in which Boing Boing was launched as a weblog. In an interview with public radio programme ‘Sound of Young America’, Frauenfelder says that weblogs are today’s best form of expression, allowing to post thoughts ‘as soon as they hit your head’. And co-editor Xeni Jardin admits that the beauty of blogs is that ‘if what you have to say is of interest to enough people or becomes over time, ideas that might not be able to get traction in commercial media can be shared with very large audiences.’ 

Free expression is then the ultimate goal of Boing Boing’s authors, who suggest different workarounds against censorware, or web filtering software. Quoting ‘entrepreneur and civil libertarian’ John Gilmore, “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” they created an useful collection to serve in particular countries where the Government activates filtering services to block access to Internet pages. Of particular relevance is Reporters Without Borders’ ‘Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents’, a technical guide for all journalists trying to get around censorship and state control of online content.

Boing Boing’s ‘list of wonderful policies’ leaves little room to wonder what its publishers think about such regulations. “They’re dangerous, have no basis in law, and they break the norms that make the Web possible. They’re a wicked, stupid idea,” the site says.
That’s why Boing Boing decided to create its own ‘wonderful policy,’ dedicated to those people who believe web publishers should be able to control who links to their sites, and how.
“No site with a linking policy (other than a policy such as this one, created to deride and undermine the idea of linking policies) may link to Boing Boing. Ever.”

E. Delaini

Published: August 10, 2007