About

Andy Baio is an Internet entrepreneur and blogger best known for his commentaries and analysis on the web culture through his personal website Waxy.org, as well as his involvement in a number of start-up ventures and events, most notably for serving on the board of directors of Kickstarter and co-founding the annual arts and technology conference XOXO.

History

Star Wars Kid

On April 29th, 2003, Baio highlighted the "Star Wars Kid" viral video on Waxy.org as one of the earliest websites to spread the footage. On July 16th, 2003, following the video's mass exposure, Baio and over 400 fans of the video raised $4,334.44 in donations and sent Raza a 30GB iPod, a gift certificate for an electronics store and a “Thank You” letter^[6] (shown below).

Afro Ninja

On October 22nd, 2004, Baio ran blog post identifying the man behind the Afro Ninja video as Allen Hicks, a stunt man who auditioned for a Nike commercial with Allen Iverson and Jim Kelly.

“Mark Allen Hicks, a stunt man auditioning for a Nike commercial with Allen Iverson and Jim Kelly. Edward works with people who know Mark, and one friend saw him come out of the audition ‘pissed off with a bloody nose.’”

Waxy.org

Baio registered the domain Waxy.org^[1] on June 2nd, 2000. The site contained a placeholder image with the words "Generic Website" until April 14th, 2002, when it was converted into a personal blog.^[3]

Upcoming.org

On September 19th, 2003, Baio launched the social event calendar site Upcoming.^[4] In October 2005, Yahoo acquired the site for an undisclosed amount, hiring Baio as the technical director for the website. In April 2013, Yahoo announced the site would be discontinued. On May 8th, 2014, Baio created a Kickstarter^[8] campaign to relaunch the site, which successfully raised over $104,900 within the same month, tripling its initial goal of $30,000.

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Supercuts.org

On April 11th, 2008, Baio published a post on Waxy titled "Fanboy Supercuts, Obsessive Video Montages," which defined the term "supercut" as:

"(A) genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage."

On November 1st, 2011, Andy Baio announced the relaunch of the website Supercut.org^[11] into a supercut video database with several different categories where users could upload their own videos.

Kickstarter.com

In September 2008, Baio became a member of Kickstarter's board of directors and was hired as the crowdfunding platform's chief technical officer (CTO) in July 2009. In November 2010, Baio left Kickstarter to work at the non-profit technology incubator Expert Labs.

XOXO Festival

On May 24th, 2012, Baio and co-founder Andy McMillan launched a Kickstarter^[5] campaign for the XOXO Festival, an annual arts and technology conference held in Portland, Oregon. By June 15th, the campaign raised over $175,500 of it's $125,000 goal.

Reputation

Stance on #GamerGate

On September 16th, 2014, Baio tweeted^[7] about the 4chan ban on GamerGate discussion, noting his amusement that users were speculating founder Christopher Poole was swayed by attending that year's XOXO Festival (shown below).

On October 27th, Baio released an analysis of the #GamerGate Twitter hashtag on the blog-publishing platform Medium.^[9] In the article, Baio disclosed "a strong anti-GamerGate bias" due to his relationships with Anita Sarkeesian and video games journalist Leigh Alexander. Baio claimed that a majority of #GamerGate tweets came from newly-created accounts, were retweets and that the opposing groups were largely echo chambers (shown below). On November 19th, Baio was added to a Pastebin^[2] document containing a list of people "actively working against GG."

Defense of Internet Archive

On January 28th, 2015, Baio published an article on Medium^[10] about Google shifting priorities away from archiving the web, which praised the Internet Archive and TextFiles founder Jason Scott for their efforts in preserving Internet content.

Search Interest

External References