Boing Boing » blogging

The blogging family tree

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:04:01 +0000

"At the close of 1998, there were 23 known weblogs on the Internet. A year later there were tens of thousands. What changed?" [Mat Honan / Wired]

Blogger paid

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:49:50 +0000

In this video, blogger Duane Lester confronts the editor of a newspaper which plagiarized something he wrote. The best part is when the editor tries to physically intimidate him, a moment so inexplicable and hilarious I created a YouTube Infinite Loop of it for you.

There's a happy ending, though: he ultimately saw reason and paid Lester for the article.

How to Assert Copyright Over Your Work When It’s Been Plagiarized [All American Blogger via Jim Romenesko]

Blogging '76

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:08:29 +0000

Stephen Thompson's nonfiction project—publishing his 1976 high school journal as a blog and book—soon attracted the attention of a novelty book publisher. But he is instead kickstarting it, to ensure the right tone is kept: "my blog surprised me by really reaching out to a lot of people around the world who could relate, and I wanted to at least take a shot at raising the money to do it the way I saw it."

Bloggers and students: Apply for Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:01:03 +0000

If you live in the UK or Ireland, write about science, and have not been paid for that work, then you are eligible to apply for the Wellcome Trust's Science Writing Prize. The Prize is aimed at fostering high quality writing among science communicators who are either just starting their careers, or who write mainly as a hobby. Student journalists are eligible. So are people who blog about science. There are separate categories for professional scientists, and interested laypeople. The deadline is April 25.

Behold! FWD, a new tech blog at Buzzfeed

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:33:55 +0000

Matt Buchanan and John W. Herrman started a new tech blog, FWD. Early delights include Herrman on why we sound so dumb when we talk about communications; Buchanan on the ever-increasing importance of software; and Mike Hayes on Sam Spratt's fantastic Facebook Timeline banners. Also, did you know that the secret to successful consumer technology is how good it feels in the hand?

The golden age of journalists noticing new blogs is over

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:32:33 +0000

Jeremiah Owyang writes that the golden age of blogging is over.

The reasons, in brief: many top blogs have sold out; staff turnover saw "star" voices slip off the radar; younger audiences like social networking more; and advertising revenue is increasingly hard to get at.

All the reasons given are true, but they're not reasons to believe that a golden age has passed. They're phenomena in their own right, each with its own story, and only the last presenting a barrier to entry for newcomers. Epochal change makes for an epic narrative, but all this adds up to a simpler truth: media is a tough game and you won't get far by copying what other people did years ago.

The first change Owyang notes is that many blogs expanded from a handful of editors to become large newsrooms. Though he acknowledges that they're no longer just blogs, he seems to assume that they've grown without vacating old ground. But how can they not? Institutional growth has consequences: bureaucracy, editorial friction, and all that corporate oversight. Fresh faces can take advantage of the opportunities, approaches and risks that the big guys grow out of.

Sarah Lacy puts it best:

"There are still plenty of people who love to write-- not just share, Tweet and comment-- for a living, and blogs are still the best platform for that. In many ways, professional blogging is just getting started. It's a time when new entrants are jumping into the field with bold, fresh ideas, standing on the shoulders of the blogging giants that came before, taking a second stab at reinventing the new media landscape."

The high turnover issue, Owyang's second, seems the reddest herring in his list. Blogging isn't a literary or journalistic movement associated with a generational voice. And besides, writers are flighty.

The final point, that the economics of the business are "entrenched", is true enough. But making money from writing has always been difficult, and vanishingly few ever made much of it blogging.

Media interest always tended toward entrepreneurs in the field, and this ignores the fact that the majority of bloggers are amateurs or freelancers working for others. No Golden Age could just be about a handful of successful businesspeople; blogging has minted a fair few millionaires, but as an industry, it equals a lunchtime fluctuation in News Corporation's share price. There's still plenty of opportunity to go around, from the ground up, for anyone interested.

There was never a golden age of blogging, just a golden age of mainstream interest in what it all meant. Don't worry about it; opportunity does not knock but once. You need obsession, a work ethic, and an uncommon voice. That's tough, but that's all. The rest is counting the hours, and we've all got plenty of those.

End of an Era: The Golden Age of Tech Blogging is Over [Web Strategist]
Golden Age of Tech Blogging Done? I Couldn't Disagree More [Sarah Lacy]

Boing Boing featured in anthology of best science writing on the Web

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:42:44 +0000

I am very pleased to announce that two BoingBoing posts made it into The Open Laboratory 2012, an anthology of the best science writing on the Internet.

The first was written by Lee Billings, an excellent guest blogger we hosted back in February. Lee wrote a lot of great posts about Kepler and the hunt for exoplanets and deserves huge kudos. Incredible Journey: Can We Reach the Stars Without Breaking the Bank? is the one that will be in the anthology.

Today, the fastest humans on Earth and in history are three elderly Americans, all of whom Usain Bolt could demolish in a footrace. They're the astronauts of Apollo 10, who in 1969 re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at a velocity of 39,897 kph upon their return from the Moon. At that speed you could get from New York to Los Angeles in less than six minutes. Seven years after Apollo 10, we hurled a probe called Helios II into an orbit that sends it swinging blisteringly deep into the Sun's gravity well. At its point of closest approach, the probe travels at almost 253,000 kph—the fastest speed yet attained by a manmade object. The fastest outgoing object, Voyager I, launched the year after Helios II. It's now almost 17 billion kilometers away, and travels another 17 kilometers further away each and every second. If it were headed toward Alpha Centauri (it's not), it wouldn't arrive for more than 70,000 years. Even then, it wouldn't be able to slow down. Of the nearest 500 stars scattered like sand around our own, most would require hundreds of thousands of years (or more) to reach with current technology.

Our second post is one of mine: Nuclear Energy 101: Inside the Black Box of Nuclear Power Plants. It's from our Fukushima coverage, and was published on March 12, a day after the nuclear reactors in Fukushima were damaged by an earthquake and tsunami.

For the vast majority of people, nuclear power is a black box technology. Radioactive stuff goes in. Electricity (and nuclear waste) comes out. Somewhere in there, we're aware that explosions and meltdowns can happen. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that set of information is enough to get by on. But, then, an emergency like this happens and, suddenly, keeping up-to-date on the news feels like you've walked in on the middle of a movie. Nobody pauses to catch you up on all the stuff you missed. As I write this, it's still not clear how bad, or how big, the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant will be. I don't know enough to speculate on that. I'm not sure anyone does. But I can give you a clearer picture of what's inside the black box. That way, whatever happens at Fukushima, you'll understand why it's happening, and what it means.

Thanks to Open Laboratory editors Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Ouellette. BoingBoing is honored to be included, and we're doubly happy to see the fine work of our guest bloggers recognized!

You can read all the posts that were selected. In fact, you should read them. They represent some truly wonderful work by journalists, scientists, and bloggers. Here's a link to the full list.

Om Malik reflects on a decade of blogging

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 13:52:56 +0000

"Blogging is not about opinion but it is about viewing the world in a certain way and sharing it with others how you look at things."

Sunset of a Blog

Glenn Fleishman — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:05:16 +0000

Photo: Rajeev Nair / Ill. Rob Beschizza.

Should we pity a once-popular blog when its time in the sun has come and gone? Not so much. I'm watching the sunset of a moderately high-traffic site I've run for a decade, and that seems the natural course of events. Like the hecatomb of evolution, many blogs rose and then were slaughtered in the crucible of viewer attention (and blogger interest). Those that survive are fitter—or at least live in areas with abundant page views.

A recent glance at my statistics put me in a funk, briefly, until I dashed through Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief, adapted for the fast-paced online age. Denial: The stats must be broken! Anger: This is an awesome site; everyone must be blind! Bargaining: Maybe if I do a redesign? Depression: All that effort, for naught. Acceptance: Hey, what's going on at Reddit?

The site, Wi-Fi Networking News, has been mostly a one-man band, run by yours truly since April 2001. I launched it after reporting for The New York Times on the new and bizarre phenomenon of Wi-Fi hotspots, which were in their infancy, and poised for explosive growth. (Bonus points: The picture that accompanies the article was taken in a train station in Fremont, Calif., that my father once leased as a furniture store in the 1970s.) Wi-Fi meshed with my technical knowledge and interests, and it seemed like the right star to which to hitch my wagon.

The site received inordinate attention, even to my ego-driven self, after some months of operation because I mixed straight technology reportage, opinion, and normal link-to-others blogging. There weren't that many blogs like that at the time, partly because it was difficult to build an audience. I was still near the start of my freelance career, and was suffering through the dotcom collapse, which left folks like me without as many paying outlets, and the pay was worse. Reporting for my own blog seemed like a wise course of action, and a calling card that did in actuality bring me more paying work later on.

I was also early on in accepting sponsorship, and then later advertising. The blog was never a vast moneymaker for me, but it brought in some tens of thousands of dollars a year in its best years, and I was able to hire a part-time collaborator for a couple of years as well. John Battelle's Federated Media, which started up in part to push ads to Boing Boing's pages, took me on as an early experiment, and they still power the page impressions on my site.

But as a niche player, I could only fill up that niche. As more general sites appeared in which Wi-Fi played a role, my blog shrunk in importance. I even helped move this along, as I discovered in 2007 that the Wi-Fi site was part of the inspiration for the first in what are now legions of gadget blogs. (I'm sorry.) Peter Rojas, the first editor of Nick Denton's Gizmodo, said in an interview back then, swelling my head:

We came up with this idea for Gizmodo...if we were going to do a blog, it had to be something about technology. And we were really inspired by Glenn Fleishman’s Wi-Fi Networking News, which is a blog that he had done which was almost kind of like a trade journal about Wi-Fi, which was still a relatively new technology....And so if you were a technology journalist or someone in the industry, it was like a great place to go. And it was very focused. And we thought, “Well what if we did that with something like gadgets...

Rather touching, that. Rojas left Gizmodo to build Engadget for Jason Calacanis (it was later purchased by AOL), and later gdgt with a close colleague. I might quibble about which of these sites and some others of similar scale are worth consulting (or trusting) today, but they filled the zone of technology news, competing among themselves for any scrap of information worth publishing. (Hey, even Boing Boing had one of those for a while, led initially by the inestimable Joel Johnson.)

Now hundreds upon hundreds of similar but inferior sites daily pore over the least bit of unintentionally revealed dibs and dabs, or purely speculate, and then clusterlink to each other in the echo chamber of technophilia. Many thousands (or tens of thousands) of scabby sites simply excerpt articles from others, making the furore even louder. Haven't you all had the experience of finding an inadequate few grafs about new technology, following the link to the original story, and repeating until you were five sites away?

I kept the Wi-Fi site focused, however, as I lack the true obsessive nature of the gadget hunter, and I prefer more than a handful of hours of sleep each evening. That proved my undoing, and I don't regret it. I had a good run in the mid-oughties. The site prospered from the confusing state of wireless networking that lasted until about 2008. The term Wi-Fi is a trade group's kiss of interoperability, ostensibly assuring that all such branded hardware works together. In practice, until relatively recently, the combination of different generations of hardware, operating system support, third-party add-on software, and security measures, such as firewalls, often prevented one-click access.

This was particularly the case with 802.11n, which is now the standard flavor of Wi-Fi found in all gateways, laptops, and nearly all mobiles. For three years, the industry roiled around different elements of the protocol, releasing pre-standard uncertified gear that often didn't work across different makers' models. The industry opted for a grand compromise in early 2007 that prevented it shattering into chipmaker-specific gear.

Good fortune also came in 2004 with the short-lived run of municipal networking, in which towns, cities and counties promoted large-scale Wi-Fi networks built for indoor and outdoor use. Right-wing, bought-and-paid-for thinktanks created several negative reports, based on incorrect analyses of fiber-optic networks. I fought back. Of particular interest is my 2005 post "Sock Puppets of Industry." But it never seemed like municipal networks would take off because of technical limitations of Wi-Fi. I penned a dubious take for The Economist in 2006 at the height of the fervor, which peaked in 2007. Out of well over a hundred planned efforts, only a few were built and a couple remain active. (There's been a recent uptick in interest again with a more realistic basis using better-suited equipment, and public-safety wireless networks, often using licensed bands dedicated for the purpose, have worked quite well on the whole.)

The Wi-Fi site's traffic peaked at the top of muni-Fi hype, receiving about 250,000 page views a month in 2006 and slightly fewer unique visitors. It has had a slow and inexorable decline since. It now welcomes about 25,000 visitors monthly who look at a page or so each. Most visitors are reading older pages, directed there by Google. The most popular page of all time is how to set a password on a Linksys model that hasn't been sold for a few years. As traffic has ebbed, I have updated the site less frequently.

Everything has its season, and the paucity of visitors corresponds both to the level of competition from general technology reporting and gadget sites, and to the ease with which Wi-Fi now performs. When Wi-Fi was hard, my site was useful; when it's like breathing air, not so much.

Such independent reporting sites as mine are fewer and farther between, because we simply can't afford to devote the time without at least some moderate recurring income. The promise of making a living from advertising turned out to be a function of the power-law curve described by author and academic Clay Shirky in a famous 2003 essay. More popular sites inevitably became substantially more popular, while attention wanes disproportionately on sites that receive somewhat less attention.

Partly, too, newspapers, magazines and purely digital operations absorbed the lessons of the blog—breezy, informal, brief, and timely items—which took mojo away from sites that couldn't market to existing large readerships.

Boing Boing floated to the top of the blog-slash-reportage world, as it fed ever more readers ever more items from a growing cornucopia of wonderful things. My site and many like it sunk to the bottom as fewer visitors led to fewer visitors. And that, dear readers, is why you find me at this address today.