Author Archives: Niall Murphy

Broadsheet hearts the Boing. But we had no idea Frauenfelder, Doctorow, Jardin and Pescovitz were this successful.

Look upon their works, ye bloggers, and despair.

boingboing.net remains among the most popular 10 or 20 blogs around. According to Quantcast data, it gets about 2.5 million unique visitors a month, racking up 9.8 million page views, a traffic increase of around 20% over 2009. It attracts blue-chip advertisers such as American Express and Verizon. It makes a nice living for its founders and a handful of contract employees.

And what really makes it interesting is that it does this with a mix of material that remains as eclectic, strange, and sometimes nonsensical as the obscure personal blog it started out as.

Inside the Wild Wacky Profitable World of Boing Boing (Fast Company)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhXid6PmkO4&feature=player_embedded

The latest Wikileaks scandal gets the Taiwanese News Animation treatment from NMA.

In Hell, all news is like this.

Previously: Ireland’s Debt Crisis in animated form.

NMA

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37pwbUp8t1I&feature=player_embedded#!

Highlights of the Battle Of The Year 2010 international breakdancing championships last Saturday in Montpelier.

Music by Kraddy.

YAKfilms

Treehoppers. They exist. Deal with it.

Firstly: Did God drop acid back in the day?

The second thing one asks is, “What the bloody hell is all that ornamentation on the thorax?” (Note that the “balls” on the antenna-like structure aren’t eyes, but simply spheres of chitin.)  A first guess is that it’s a sexually-selected trait, but those are often limited to males, and these creatures show the ornaments in both sexes.  Kemp hypothesizes—and this seems quite reasonable—that “the hollow globes, like the remarkable excrescences exhibited by other treehoppers, probably deter predators.”  It would be hard to grab, much less chow down on, a beast with all those spines and excrescences.

More pix and the full article by  ecologist Jerry A Coyne here.

BoingBoing