Twenty years ago today, Boing Boing became a blog. Mark Frauenfelder's first post linked to Street Tech, a now-dormant gadget blog. Now there are 160,000 more posts just like it and the impossible task of summarizing the best of them in yet another.
Founded as a print zine in 1988 by Mark and Carla Sinclair, Mark's personal retrospective posted earlier today is a must-read; following are a few of our greatest hits, proudest accomplishments, clickiest traffic monsters, and best features of all time.
Despite the tens of millions of words in our database – mostly wonderful things – it's oftentimes the shortest posts that get the most attention.
So it was with Xeni Jardin's Ralph Lauren opens new outlet store in the Uncanny Valley, a single-sentence reblog of a now-vanished post at another site highlighting the incompetently dysmorphic photomanipulations in one of the fashion house's ads.
Ralph Lauren tried to force us to remove the post, to no avail.
That wasn't our first rodeo, either. In 2008, were were sued by MagicJack, makers of a VoIP dongle, after criticizing its terms of service. We stood our ground and beat them in court. Ten years later, Playboy sued us for posting about someone else's uploaded cover collection, claiming that linking to things is a form of copyright infringement. We beat them too, with the help of able friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
It's not all law and chaos, though.
Mark Frauenfelder says he's most proud of his two-part series on the fortified residential mailboxes of Los Angeles, Survival of the fittest mailbox and Fortified mailboxes, part 2. Read the rest
