A conversation with Cory Doctorow

On Boing Boing

bit-tech: So how did you get involved in Boing Boing?

Cory: Well I've always been someone who's interested in telling people about interesting things I've found. I used to edit a monthly column of ten things you should look at on the internet for Sci-Fi Channel magazine, 1990-95, so before the net really took off.

Mark, the Editor-In-Chief of Boing Boing, he had run the magazine as a print magazine. It went under when there was a big print die-off as the big magazine publishers went under and took all the mags with them, so he restarted it as a weblog - to try out Blogger for an article he was working on. It went very well, but it was only really a modest success...

Then when Dean Kayman invented the Segway, and announced it but didn't announce what it was, he said "The codename is 'Ginger', I've got investors but i wont tell you what it is." Mark went and looked up the patent drawing and published a picture of the Segway, essentially, and said that this is what it was. It ended up on CNN!

He had 7000 people stop by that night, but was going on holiday the next day. He talked to me and said "Well, some of those people are coming back tomorrow, it would be great if there was something new for them to see. Would you like to guest edit?" I knew Mark from his Wired days, so I said "Sure". At the end of the two weeks he said "Great, why don't you stick around?" And so I did....


bit-tech: What motivates you to find and post cool stuff for readers every day? Do you ever yearn to rally its millions of readers around a political or social cause?

Cory: Well, first and foremost it's a site where I post the stuff that I'm interested in so that I can keep track of it. That's been really liberating, because you don't have to write about the stuff you think people will be interested in, you can write about the stuff you're interested in yourself.

I think that's the big difference between a blog and a magazine. With a mag you start with a notional audience and try to figure out what they'll enjoy; with a blog you just write what you enjoy and hope that an audience will accrue around it.

That said Boing Boing clearly has some viability as an activist rousing point. We've had some rows about getting people to action before...

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