Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, an
independent journalist and programmer living in
Portland, Oregon. I created Today is the fifth anniversary of Boing Boing's relaunch, the day they switched from a traditional webzine to uber-blog.
To commemorate the birthday, the gang released a complete dump of every Boing Boing entry for free download. I'm hosting the torrent on my tracker, and I pulled together some statistics. (Is anyone surprised?)
Try my new Boing Boing Statistics. Most notably, use the keyword tracker to search the popularity of keywords over time, broken down by author. This is outstanding for looking at trends, or the uniquely quirky obsessions of each author.
Let me know if you have any suggestions, or have found other uses for the data dump.
January 22, 2005: By request, here's a direct download of the 5-year archive.
3:01 PM
is there any way to use it to get Cory to blog more often? Xeni's taking over that place, and not for the better...
3:54 PM
The "Zeitgeist" Flash is very interesting and implemented very smoothly. I saw "Terror" shows a peak at around 9/11, as one could expect. "Podcasting" must be a new trend as it's only been picked up this year.
My use of this data dump, so far -- for nostalgia's sake, I extracted interesting quotes on Google:
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-01-21-n42.html
3:58 PM
I was housecleaning last month and found the first eight issues of the paper "Boing Boing" fanzine Mark did in the 80s. Many of these were handmade, with glued-on artwork. I'm not sure what to do with this, though...?
4:02 PM
If it were me, I'd wrap them in plastic and pray over them nightly. (Like I do with my complete print run of Might.)
10:04 AM
I'm probably ignorant, but I ignore Bit Torrent feeds because I'm on dial-up, and I think I will be the weakest link in any such torrent, plus I think that it will both take longer, and it will hog my limited bandwith beyond the typical download time from a single server, due to my apparent promise to pass it on. It is all just too viral for me...
Anyone have a regular vanilla download?
11:36 AM
Bud: Here's a direct download of the file.
1:54 PM
Thanks for sharing this! :)
1:53 PM
It's interesting, in a completely meaningless way, to see the strange mid-life spike in Cory posts that used the word "boing."
3:03 PM
Interesting in a similarly meaningless way:
gender and posts using 'sex'
gender and posts using 'porn'
(Pointed out by a sociology-centric friend)
4:23 PM
Oh man. Waxy, if you ever decide to get into copyright violation in a big way, that Might archive would be awfully tasty; I only ever picked up a few issues (and "Shiny Adidas Tracksuits").
5:11 PM
I'd love to see some exposure as to what some of the most frequent terms are - BBC is a good one, but as it stands you pretty much have to know what to search for.
2:32 AM
Does the stats page run off the MT export format alone? If so - could you open source the page source and the stats generation code?
This could be fun to do for other MT based blogs as well.
7:02 AM
No, I actually imported the exported entries into a new MT blog. Then I simply queried the MovableType database in MySQL directly. There isn't much to it.