Big Daddy of the Blogosphere

Sydney Morning Herald has a piece on the reach and impact of Boing Boing:

But the six-year-old "directory of wonderful things" attracts more than 1.7 million readers a day, and that is the kind of following that can give a website serious clout.

"Blogs have a different way of writing news and breaking news," says the site's co-editor, Cory Doctorow, who is in Australia on a lecture tour. "Newspapers can't go to print saying 'we've heard something but we're not too sure'. With blogs, this is not only possible but desirable. You say: 'I've noticed something, what do you think?' People add to the story, you update it."

"The greatest threat to an artist is obscurity, not piracy," says Doctorow, who has released three other novels on the internet. "All the people out there who didn't buy my books mainly did so because they hadn't heard of me, not because they could get it for free.