BoingBoing: A Directory of Wonderful Things is a groupblog that provides a mix of Web humor, art, politics, sex, gadgetry and unicorns. It is probably the only blog popular enough to receive its own backlash. I used to visit BoingBoing on a regular basis, nowadays it fills my feed reader. This analysis, completed for my New Media Practices course, takes the form of three short studies/observations, and assumes that readers are already somewhat familiar with the blog (for proper introduction, see the wikipedia article).
A Directory Exhumed
When I first saw BoingBoing’s extended title, ‘A Directory of Wonderful Things’, I thought it was just a juxtaposition meant to be funny. How could anyone associate ‘directory’ with such seemingly random posts? But the title has a history, and ‘directory of wonderful things’ actually refers to, well, a real directory. Comprising 93 things, the directory was (as far as I can tell) carefully compiled and annotated by Mark Frauenfelder in early 2000, when BoingBoing became a ‘real’ blog. It was featured prominently, as seen here at the top of the blog’s right column:
But within a year, the directory was forced below the fold to make room for a ‘donate’ button and a merchandise link (among other things). It also disappeared from the top menu bar. Jump forward another 2 years to 2003, and we find the directory - still the same 93 things - by scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page:
And then finally, a few days later, it disappears altogether:
In a way, the disappearance of Boingboing’s directory reflects more general changes that were happening on the Web. A professor recently pointed out (also using the Internet Archive) how something similar occurred at Google. Its directory was slowly being phased out, just as the Web’s most comprehensive directory - Yahoo - had to surrender to algorithmic search in order to better compete with Sergei and Larry.
Not to worry, though. Those carefully edited directories are still ‘out there’, if a little disheveled. Boingboing’s directory of 93 things can be found here. To get to Google’s directory, you will have to google it.
Where Unicorns Come From
If the directory’s drop from the front page signified the growing diversity of Boingboing’s output, continuity started appearing in other ways. The various authors have specific interests, beliefs and favorite topics, and these all reflected in their respective ‘canons’ of work. Cory Doctorow, for example, does e-activism and cyberpunk related news, while Mark Frauenfelder tends to write more about art, DIY crafts and gadgets.
The tendency of the authors to specialize and, in a way, to homogenize the overriding category of ‘wonderful things’ is most apparent with the postings of Xeni Jardin. Xeni takes full advantage of the knowledge that most of the audience consists of (at least somewhat) regular readers, often taking up recurring themes. These include the irregular series of Unicorn Chasers (which are posted directly after any gross content) and Web Zen , as well as previous ‘trends’ that spanned a number of posts, such as those child-eating robots.
But am I not jumping to conclusions? To test these assumptions, I took the top ten posts by Cory and Xeni (according to a google search) and made some word clouds (click on the images for larger versions):
While the samples are way too small, and questionably obtained, you can see some differences already. Cory seems more interested in copyright, science fiction and, here, in the movie industry, while Xeni’s cloud suggests a more international outlook, attention to current news stories (especially concerning human rights) and of course to Virgin Airlines’ decision to let BoingBoing name one of their new planes. The authors could not resist, and dubbed the plane ‘Unicorn Chaser’ (perhaps as a corrective to the horrible experience of London airports?).
Boing Boing as ‘Obligatory Passing Point’
If the BoingBoing authors are to be described in terms of citizen-journalism - I doubt they would use that word themselves, but oh well - then it is interesting to note that, rather than simply represent a different kind of journalist, they are quite adept at shifting between roles. At different times, they can be seen as fellow audience members, as distributors of news or, increasingly, as the source of news. BoingBoing may thus in part be understood in the way it makes us rethink traditional journalistic categories (see Fred Turner, 2005 for more on this). Cory Doctorow’s focus on Web politics is a case in point: in late 2005, he seemed to juggle all three roles as he made BoingBoing a central player in the Sony DRM Rootkit scandal. Initially a fellow spectator, Doctorow (also acting as high-profile member of the EFF) quickly took on the task of centralizing related content in Sony round-ups and, at times, even leading the charge.
Arguably, the role-switching going on at BoingBoing has contributed to both the perceived effect of blogging as a cultural form and the perception that bloggers share the common aim of keeping the mainstream media and their corporate sponsors in check. What kind of formatting power do such perceptions have, and what does it mean for other bloggers? These, anyway, are some of the major points raised by Geert Lovink in his article “Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse“.
Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, in their early work on Actor-network theory (ANT), introduced the term ‘obligatory passing point’ to denote powerful actants within networks. This is different, however, to the ‘hub’ in network theory, as ANT understands power as something extrinsic. In ANT, power is the extent to which others (people and things) do the work for you. The point may be applied here: you can’t find the ‘power’ that BoingBoing yields on the site itself - rather, you have to look everywhere else.
With this in mind, I’ll end this review with a final observation: from the day BoingBoing switched to a Blog format in 2000, the first link on its menu bar was “Suggest a site”. Clicking on the link would produce the following form:
While the form is now more detailed and less purple, it remains important. Unlike BoingBoing’s directory, this won’t disappear.
Acknowledgements, etc.
The analyses here were carried out using tools made by the Digital Methods Initiative. For more on the blurring of journalistic boundaries see Fred Turner (2005), “Actor-networking the News,” Social Epistemology 19(4): 321-4.
Nice analysis of the history of Boing Boing and the demise of the directory. I should have read your piece before I went to the Cory Doctorow Q&A! More Doctorow and Boing Boing stuff here: PICNIC07 - Cory Doctorow Q&A at the European Bloggers (Un)Conference
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[...] front page. Google and Yahoo! also started out with organizing the web in directories but edited directories are slowly being phased out. We still use categories to organize our posts but we use tags to provide non-hierarchical [...]