Boing Boing – The Art of Doing

How to Create One of the World’s Most Succesful Blogs

From a chapter in our book, “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It so Well,” based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, founder and coeditor of BoingBoing, one of the most popular blogs for the last decade.

mark frauenfelder boingboing blogging — Mark Frauenfelder

Rare Saber-Toothed Whale, Anime, Carnival Dark Rides, Crime Photos, Tech Reviews, Gadget Tips—Boing Boing Has It All

At the dawn of blogging in 1995, Mark Frauenfelder moved his ‘zine Boing Boing online. Boing Boing—whose mission was to explore “the coolest, wackiest stuff”—became and remains one of the Internet’s most popular blogs. Defying the corporatization of the blogosphere, Boing Boing has remained a curio of oddities, tech news, gadget tips and real-life marvels with 2.5 million unique visitors a month. Now, Frauenfelder shares daily blogging duties with a troika of other passionate editors Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz and Xeni Jardin. “The recipe for an excellent blog is to be so deeply obsessed with something that you need to communicate it to others,” says Frauenfelder. “If Boing Boing stopped making money tomorrow, I’d still need to do it.” Here are his ten tips for creating a successful blog: Continue reading “How to Create One of the World’s Most Succesful Blogs”

Inside the Mind of Mark Frauenfelder:
A Blogger’s Word Cloud

A Word Cloud based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder and co-editor of BoingBoing, the iconoclastic blog, for a chapter in our book on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs.”

Frequency is the currency of a word cloud. The more a word is repeated, the larger it appears in the cloud. Click here to see the interactive version.

This word cloud is based on our interview with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder and co-editor of one of our favorite blogs (for a chapter in our book on “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs). Frauenfelder’s iconoclastic BoingBoing (whose motto is Brain Candy for Happy Mutants) has been firing out a melange of digital innovation, DIY creations and wacked-out art for a decade and a half. (Already in blog years, several life cycles long.) What we see in Frauenfelder’s word cloud is his focus is not on market share, metrics or SEO, but on building a community of people by writing interesting and amazing posts rooted in real life that will connect with the reader.

Simply put, as Frauenfelder told us: Continue reading “Inside the Mind of Mark Frauenfelder:
A Blogger’s Word Cloud”

Podcast: “The Art of Doing” on Boing Boing’s Gweek 087

Mark Frauenfelder, coeditor of BoingBoing and producer of Gweek podcast, interviews Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield about “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well.”

We spoke with Mark Frauenfelder, Boing Boing co-founder, DIY-Maker proponent and all-around pathologically curious Man about the Internet for his Gweek podcast about our book, secrets of success, what makes Sergio Corbucci‘s original “Django” so good and judgmental parents (as analyzed by Katie Roiphe) so bad, Josh’s fine art projects Gigi Gaston and Fathom Butterfly, Camille’s favorite movie of the last year “All About My Wife,” and a whole lot more.

Frauenfelder, who we interviewed for our book in a chapter “How to Create One of the World’s Most Popular Blogs,” told us that one of the principles he applies to all of his work is to: Appeal to the Novelty Gene. He told us:

“They say that there is a novelty-seeking gene. It causes people (like me!) to crave excitement, and to want constant hits of surprising things that don’t fit the conventional model of the way the world works….Ninety-nine percent of what’s out there is crap. Our job is to put in the hard work to find that 1 percent that’s fascinating because a lot of our community has the novelty-seeking gene, too.”

You can listen to our conversation on Gweek 087 here.

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