To visit Boing Boing, a group blog about curious things on the Internet, is to journey with four people on their daily wanderings online.
“We have insatiable appetites for novelty, and we’re extremely curious people,” said David Pescovitz, 34, one of the four contributors , who writes from San Francisco.
The group, journalists who met through connections at Wired magazine, is fascinated with technology and how it plays out in society.
For Xeni Jardin, who blogs from Los Angeles, Boing Boing is a “personal scrapbook” to share her “obsession” for finding “delightful, disturbing, exciting” items on the Internet. “It’s like allowing the whole world to watch your mind wander,” Jardin said.
Started in 2000, Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net) is consistently the most-linked-to blog, according to Technorati, which tracks blogs. Boing Boing routinely logs more than 1 million unique visitors a month, according to its own count.
On a recent day, posts linked to a project that harnesses computers around the world to prove Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, a database of dreams people have had about Arnold Schwarzenegger, and news of the South Korean government replacing postal workers with robots.
The group had operated Boing Boing for fun, but the mushrooming number of readers pushed up the price of hosting the site.
The group eventually hired tech publishing guru John Battelle, who founded Industry Standard magazine and was a co-founding editor at Wired, as its “band manager.”
He has lined up sponsors and sold ads. The group now receives a “small amount of income” from the venture, Pescovitz said.
“We were always seeking out and discovering new and interesting things and sharing it with our friends,” Pescovitz said.
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