Is The Boing Boing Effect The New Digg Effect?
Boing Boing is one of those sites.
One of those sites that pump out ridiculously great content at ridiculously fast rates and constantly make you wonder, how the hell do these guys monitor so much fantastic material on the web and get the time to post about it too?
Well, the writers don’t do all of the news gathering. They do turn it in into a palatable, intriguing lead that quickly helps you determine if you want to check it out or not.
If you look at any given list of Boing Boing posts, you’ll find that most of them came about thanks to a process similar to the Digg process, given away by the little “Thanks, (person’s name)” at the bottom of most posts. Sites are submitted to the team through a form by loyal readers who have found something interesting, and the writers serve as gatekeepers, only allowing the best stuff through.
This is different from the Digg system, where users submit links and everyone with an account can potentially be a gatekeeper. In reality it’s more complicated than this and isn’t such a representative social news system. I think sites like Boing Boing push through a much higher quality of links and news than those that end up on the Digg front page.
Of course, the authors do find and post a lot of material on their own - I’m not discrediting their work, after all, I’m a big fan. You’ll find a familiar name in this post, though that’s not my reason for loving the site 
I got into Boing Boing after I read Eastern Standard Tribe by contributor Cory Doctorow, who has some of the best sci-fi I’ve read yet.
During my daily perusal of Boing Boing’s articles a few days ago, I read this post on Dvorak by Cory. It links to the Dvorak Zine, which explains the system using a comic.
Hours later, the site was down - reason? Out of bandwidth, as I mentioned here.
Lately I’ve noticed two things:
- The Digg effect is getting less and less terrifying for site owners as click-throughs and page views diminish
- Boing Boing at the point where it can push a site over the bandwidth limit pretty fast
Now, my music site was featured on Boing Boing earlier this year, and bear in mind, one of the first things a person will see after clicking through to the post on my site in question is a link to download a free mp3 file.
As we all know, it takes a lot less mp3 downloads to overload bandwidth than comic downloads.
My site didn’t suffer or slow down at all; it took it rather admirably, and while music downloads skyrocketed for twelve hours, my bandwidth didn’t expire.
On the flip side, at this end of the year, Boing Boing is getting a reputation for knocking servers down and bandwidth through the roof.
It was a huge site before. Has it really grown that quickly and to that point?
People are getting tired of social news. First, they wanted to get away from editors with a bias in the mainstream media. Now, they’re realizing that too many gatekeepers means only mediocre, middle-ground content reaches the top.
Digg has a very specific audience. Young white nerds, to put it simply.
The contention is that as social news sites grow, they either become overrun with the Internet’s single largest demographic (young white nerds) or they are designed from the start to cater to that demographic.
They form the primary gatekeepers for news while surfers, people who are less likely to get involved and traverse the Internet so much and so widely that they become frequent submitters, find they’re not satisfied with the more specific demographic’s choices.
Social news, to be truly social, needs people from all areas of life to share equal prevalence in submissions and the same from those who vote and surf. Maybe it’ll work in the next generation or the one after, but the world isn’t quite that Internet media centric just yet and wider demographics not as deeply involved in internet culture yet. Most won’t become internet gatekeepers.
But Boing Boing’s gatekeepers are multifaceted:
- Mark Frauenfelder, a writer and illustrator who co-founded Boing Boing when it was still a paper zine
- Cory Doctorow (as mentioned), who is a sci-fi writer and anti-DRM-and-other-things activist
- David Pescovitz, research director, engineering writer and Editor-in-Chief of MAKE
- Xeni Jardin, a tech culture journalist who is always on TV somewhere or writing for Wired
Most of them are intimately involved with technology, but they’re educated professionals who make much better judgments than your average Digg teen.
Is it really any surprise that Digg may be giving way to more controlled inclusive media like the Boing Boing blog?
November 15th, 2007 at 7:41 am
[...] You can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here [...]
November 15th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Boing boing has been around a lot longer than Digg. It’s by far my favorite blog and always has been. You can learn a lot about successful blogging by observing what they do and how they do it.
November 21st, 2007 at 8:31 am
[...] newspapers themselves becoming less of a source for the public and more of a source for gatekeepers who do not stick to a corporate bias? I’d love to see some comparative ad spending data, since in the end it’s all a matter [...]
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:34 am
[...] usually results in that site getting slammed by insane amounts of traffic, the subject of the blog post that inspired this [...]
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:55 am
[...] Michael Martine has just written a fantastic post called What You Can Learn about Blogging from Boing Boing that covers some of the lessons you can glean from this most mighty of blogs. It brought a smile to my face to learn that Michael’s article was inspired by one of mine. [...]