While browsing Boing Boing (boingboing.net) last week, I ran into this blog entry: “The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland” — a hymn to one of America’s greatest towns — “where zines, slacking, good coffee, social consciousness, public transit and all the other sweet fantasies of the 90s are still alive.” It features Fred Armisen, a Saturday Night Live cast member and Carrie Brownstein, a 90s rocker who is especially well known in the Northwest. I forwarded the link to Friendly Dave, proprietor of Eastportlandblog.com, thinking surely this was old news for him. Dave hadn’t seen it yet. ‘Glad I could help.
I’m a newspaper editor in Indiana. In May 2010, I took a series of seminars at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., called “Journalism in Transition: A Daylong Training Workshop in Digital Media.” 
I’d never heard of Boing Boing until then, although it appears to have been founded in 1988. It’s star is big and bright on that map, he said, because of all the connections going in and out of it. In contrast, he said The New York Times isn’t visible. “It’s so small, you can’t even see it,” he said. The Times hasn’t encouraged connectivity while Boing Boing makes it easy.
Boing Boing is basically a blog run by a staff of editors and “happy mutants.” Its page on Facebook says Boing Boing’s products are “joy, excitement, curiosity, knowledge, freakfulness, high weirdness, contact high, uncanny valleys, gravity distortion fields, LOLs.” It offers an interesting mix of eclectic, newsy, artsy, nerdy, retro, humorous items daily, and a lot more. Where else can you learn that barnacles have the biggest penises of all living organisms relative to size (this is serious scientific inquiry), find a link to a gingerbread Frank Lloyd Wright Falling Water house, or consider “If the FCC was in charge of Rome’s barbarian policy” in a few clicks? I’m never disappointed when I stop by to browse Boing Boing.
– Randy Rendfeld, Celebrity Guest Blogger.
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