One night more than twenty years ago, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair fired up the photocopy machine at Mark's work and cranked out the first issue of bOING bOING, the print 'zine.* (Our new/old hand-drawn logotype at the top of this page is from that era!) Since those heady, dot matrix days of staples, stamps, and cyberpunks, quite a lot has changed. But some things haven't. Click to 2009. We're just a few months from our ten year anniversary as a blog, and are proud to have nearly 70,000 posts in the archives. We're honored that millions of people resonate with Boing Boing's take on technology, culture, and high weirdness. Thank you for your continued support. But as happy mutants, we must continue to evolve. And so we're pleased to present this re-imagining of Boing Boing.
As you probably noticed, we have a new design. Our goal with it is to highlight our most exciting, provocative, anomalous, and newsworthy posts, even after they've floated down the blog river off the front page. So, please do check out the "display case" of featured stories at the top and right of the site. Speaking of features, there will be more of those. Of course, we'll keep curating and contextualizing the most interesting things we find online, but we're also going back to bOING bOING's 'zine roots by presenting originally-reported articles. Who's writing those? We are, and the "we" is expanding in marvelous ways. We're thrilled to have several fantastic, and familiar, voices joining us on the front page:
• Rob Beschizza and Lisa Katayama, two of our favorite tech writers in the world, are shifting their efforts from BB Gadgets to the front page of Boing Boing. If you're a BB Gadgets reader, don't fret — now all of that material will be hosted right here. Meanwhile, Rob and Lisa will also get a chance to go beyond the gadget realm to explore the other microuniverses that fascinate them. Rob is also busy as Boing Boing's first ever managing editor — he does a masterful job of keeping us all in line, even if that line is quite curvy.
• Over at Offworld, Brandon Boyer has spent months charting the esoteric interzone of indie games. Henceforth, he'll also post columns and game reviews at Boing Boing that showcase the best bets for pixelated pleasure.
• Earlier this year, Maggie Koerth-Baker spent two weeks as a guestblogger and delighted us with revelations about giant squid, nasty cytokine storms, and parasites we should know and love. Now, Maggie will be here every day feeding our insatiable appetite for weird science, natural curiosities, odd anthropology, and the edges of eco-tech.
This relaunch was a major undertaking, and several people deserve a tip of the ol' propeller beanie: Rob Beschizza lit a fire under us, did the design, managed its implementation, and kept us calm. He is a creative force of quantum proportions. Master coder Dean Putney did the vast majority of the software development. As always, our stellar sysadmin, Ken Snider, kept things humming in the Jefferies tubes. Thanks to George Triantafyllakos, creator of BPreplay, the open source font we're using for headlines. And thank you to our partner John Battelle, our friend Jason Weisberger, and Federated Media's Mugs Buckley, Neil Chase, and Pete Spande for their business sense (and cents).
So with that, we hope you enjoy this evolutionary leap. Welcome back to Boing Boing: the brain mutator for higher primates.
(* Mark insists he reimbursed his former employer for the paper and toner!)
