Mark Baard has a knack for fringe science and, let’s say, odd areas of technology.

The renown Boston tech writer and Boston Globe columnist will get to explore Boston’s boldest and outwardly oddest people and discoveries in the world of science, technology, gadgetry, medicine, research, and much more with today’s launch of THE SCI-TECH HERETIC on BlastMagazine.com

“Boston is home to the world’s biggest risk-takers in science. Doctors dosing their patients with “Phase 0″ super-longevity compounds. Cyborgs trolling about with augmented vision and artificial smarts — and tracking chips under their skin. College professors moonlighting as UFOlogists and crypto-zoologists,” quipped Baard. “Now, the only place to meet these people is at Blast, and The Sci-Tech Heretic. I’m here because John Guilfoil knows a bit of our future lies inside all of that ‘crazy talk’ about science.”

The blog, located at http://heretic.blastmagazine.com covers everything from Scooby-Doo’s connection to Cryptology to artificial reality. It is the latest addition to BLAST: BOSTON’S ONLINE MAGAZINE, a 250,000-reader Generation Y-themed lifestyle publication founded here in Boston.

“This is simply a perfect fit for Blast,” said John M. Guilfoil, a Boston news reporter and the founder and editor-in-chief of Blast. “Our readers have a thirst for the latest technology. The weirder, the better.”

“Mark Baard is a name in the field of sci-tech in Boston,” Guilfoil continued. “He adds to Blast his level of professionalism, expertise, and name recognition in the local scene. We’re ecstatic to have him with is.”

“Blast is an outpost for real world journalism, in a world made surreal by out-of-control technology. There is simply no other place in Boston where you will find this kind of reporting, or The Sci-Tech Heretic,” said Baard. “John is brave and smart enough to try something different.”

ABOUT BLAST:

Launched at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve 2007, BlastMagazine.com, Blast: Boston’s Online Magazine, has grown like a weed for three years. It is a Generation Y publication focused on young, hip Bostonia with a global vision. Blast covers music, movies, tv, video games, fashion, food, sex, relationships, science, health, technology, and more. The site also covers world, local and national news. According to Alexa.org, Blast is the third most followed online publication in Boston behind Boston.com and BostonHerald.com. Blast has more than 100 contributing writers, bureaus in New York and San Diego, and reporters on three continents.

In October, Blast started podcasting.

We’re even on iTunes.

In this podcast, Blast editors John Guilfoil, Brooklynne Peters and Erica Marcus talk about what’s happening in October and what you can expect going forward!

The Massachusetts-based Friendship Home, a non-profit organization working to enrich the lives of adults with developmental disabilities and their families through quality respite care and creative programs, is pleased to announce the Fashions with Our Friends fundraising fashion show at The Lantana in Randolph, on May 13. A truly unique and heart-warming event, this years fashion show will feature Friendship Club members from Duxbury, Norwell, and Quincy walking the runway modeling fashions from local merchants.

Thanks to the support of local businesses and community members, Friendship Home is planning to break ground on their state-of-the-art respite care and activity center in Norwell for adults with developmental disabilities. The home will provide a place for life skills education, overnight stays, and fun activities for special friends while offering much needed respite for their families who often care for them 24 hours per day without relief. Currently, there are over 2,500 individuals who could benefit from such a facility, with currently only one bed available for their use on weekends. Friendship Home will provide opportunities for education and socialization as well as support for families that are often overwhelmed and isolated. These services are currently offered for four hour periods twice per month in each of three Friendship Club locations.

The Fashion with Our Friends show includes dinner, a raffle and entertainment along with the club member’s fashion show and grand finale performance! Tickets are available on our website for $50 each or through our office — www.friendshiphome.net or call 781-740-9507 for more information.

About Friendship Home

At Friendship Home, we are parents, friends, business people, and volunteers from many walks of life, committed to creating a safe, warm, and nurturing home for our sons, daughters, and friends. Our mission is to enrich the lives of individuals with developmental disabilities and their families through quality respite care and creative learning experiences. Friendship Home provides an opportunity for community members to help families build a stronger community. Once completed, Friendship Home will be a respite and activity center where people with developmental disabilities can stay for periods of up to two weeks, giving them a safe and stimulating environment, while offering needed respite for their caregivers. For more information visit www.friendshiphome.net or call 781-740-9507.

We have over a dozen Plantronics Audio 350 gaming headsets that we’re just throwing at our readers right now. Enjoy the ultimate gaming headset for free!

What do you have to do to get one of these freebies? Write a review! Review a new movie, music album, video game, software, hardware, gadget, laptop, camera, pretty much whatever you want. Write up a review that’s at least 400 words, and if we use it, you’ll get a freebie!

Email all reviews to newsroom@blastmagazine.com, and include your name, address, website address if you have one, the review, any photos you have of the product and don’t forget the 1-5 star rating!

1. Expanding food coverage
1.5 MEETING!
2. Redesigned section pages
3. LOCAL
4. News coverage
5. Editors changing jobs
6. Our new intern

First of all, I’m happy to announce that we’re going to be expanding our food and drink coverage, adding regular content from John Forrester, who started at the Globe on the same day as me “way back in the day.” He’s the past editor-in-chief of the Suffolk Journal, and we’re lucky to have him.

He gave us a few stories last year, ( http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/culturefashion/2007/03/irish-eats-shepherds-pie/ ) and I’ve been badgering him ever since.

You’ll be hearing from him soon, because John has set up a Blast meet-up on November 12 in Boston. More on that soon.

Second big announcement: I have completely redesigned the Culture page. http://blastmagazine.com/culture/

I’ll be coding variations of our Food and Entertainment pages over the next few weeks. It takes a full day to do each page, so bear with me.

Please give me feedback on this! It will be vital as I do the rest of the sections.

Third big announcement: Blast is going local. Ok, maybe not totally local. But we’ve decided to base ourselves in the Northeast U.S., where we (mostly) live. That’s mainly Boston, New York, and then Philly for our sports guys. This will not change anything in a negative way — we won’t be removing anything, but we’ll be adding something very important that ties into the fourth announcement.

Fourth announcement, Blast is covering news. You’ve seen the amazing stylings of Sachin Seth and his Terra Blog http://blastmagazine.com/terra/ as our first foray into world news coverage. It’s been an amazing success and is drawing a ton of traffic. We’ll be creating a News Page on the site and incorporating a redesigned Boston/Local page that we’ll be promoting much more (JP, take notes). We’ll also incorporate the Terra Blog, and taking World News, People, and Enterprise out of Culture, and putting them into the news section. We’ll also add our Business section, which never really took off. We’re also adding a national and legal/crime news sub-section.

We’re not just going to cover news for the sake of covering news. We’re taking specific topics like cyber crime, privacy law cases, and topics that appeal to our Generation Y audience. For example: http://blastmagazine.com/the-magazine/technology/2008/10/fbi-major-cyber-attacks-in-the-rise/

And we’ll have a few new contributors to announce next month and at the meeting that are looking forward to tackling this section.

This is a big deal for Blast, because we always wanted to have a NEWS component that was separate from the magazine, and now we have it.

Going forward, it’s very important to push the concept of three totally different components to BLAST. There’s “The Issue” and “The Magazine” — our monthly content and regularly updated push content in our sections. There’s “The Blogs” — controlled directly by the writers. And “The News” which straddles the line between both.

The next announcement is that we’re realigning our editors. — Just bear in mind that this doesn’t mean that anyone is limited to only working within their sections. We all write everything, and we all help each other out.

Bessie King, who added culture and fashion to her repertoire when Dan Peleschuk went to Ukraine, will become the Culture Editor on November 1. She will oversee Culture, Fashion, Beauty, Politics, Automotive, Art, Love, Sex, Book Reviews and Travel in this diverse, vital section of the magazine. She will also be the editor in charge of our new “Literary” section ( http://blastmagazine.com/the-literary ) which takes original and public domain literature and features it for our readers.

Terri Schwartz will be elevated to Entertainment Editor on November 1. Terri proved herself after covering E3 and Comic-Con for Blast in California. She’s already built up a network of connections and recruited new writers, who you’ve seen this month. She will oversee Music, Movies, Celebrities (including an upcoming Celeb Gossip blog, shhhh, it’s still a secret) and that “Twilight” page that gets SO MANY freaking hits and comments, it’s not even funny. In her capacity, she is doing a ton of work with opinion pieces and reviews, so she will be contributing to the Technology section as well by helping out managing some of the video game reviews.

Joe Sinicki remains Technology Editor. This section is one of our main draws, and we’re hesitant to make any changes. I will say that we’ve flirted with the idea of making Technology more of a science and hard tech section and pulling video games and video game reviews into their own section. That’s not happening right now though.

Liz Raftery is still second in command. She’s the ace in the hole; one of the best writers and reporters I’ve ever worked with. Even the editors have to go through her when they want to put something on the cover. She’s also responsible for Enterprise, The Blast Interview, and we’re working her into News.

Micah and Perry are still sports. Though I’m sure they’d rather be in charge of world news.

That leaves me. In addition to the design and coding, I managing the staff and oversee Tech and Sports. I also manage the blogs, Food, Retro, Shoebox, and I will take point on News until someone takes it off my hands.

The rough, loose reporting structure has Terri and Bessie reporting to Liz for copy editing and guidance and Joe and Micah/Perry reporting to me.

That is just meant to give you a general overview of how a story goes from reporting to live on the site. Two sets of eyes need to see any non-blog post before we post it.

Last but not least, Blast took on an intern this semester. Liz McClendon is a student at Virginia Tech. She’s especially interested in Twilight and Literature, so she’ll be adding to The Literary and will be a big part of our News coverage going forward.

We’ve had a great few months, and the things we’re putting into place are going to take Blast to the next level.

And it’s all because of you.

John

The same search bar you see up top is now programmed for the Google Custom Search. Go to it!

The best thing about Custom Search is that it allows us to not only search by all facets of the site (like who wrote it) but that it lets us import all the sites in our network to one searchable database.

Therefore, you can search PSA, OTR, MadeHand, PRrag, Blast, all the internal blast blogs, This is God Given, and even some of our regular writers’ personal blogs all in one place!

This is a big move for WordPress, which has been looking for a new commenting system for a while and seems to have found it finally.

In a blog post on their website, IntenseDebate describes the deal and what it means for the product.

1. We will be temporarily going back into private beta. This won’t affect our current users, but new installs will require an invite code. This is just to give us a little time to ramp up the hardware and get our ducks in a row as we join the Automattic team.

2. You’ll be seeing IntenseDebate a lot more often. We’re really excited about the distribution possibilities this opens up, so expect to see our comment system and use your IntenseDebate profile on a lot more blogs.

3. You can look forward to tighter integration with some of the other Automattic joints including Akismet and Gravatar.

The next major release of WordPress, version 2.7, will be the first implementation of the popular blogging and content management system to incorporate the IntenseDebate features, which include threaded commenting, user reputation, comment analytics and better administrative tracking of comments than WordPress’ current system.

WordPress is the system that powers Blast Magazine.

When WordPress 2.7 is released, we will first install it on a test server, then begin to integrate it into our outside blogs first, testing for bugs and incompatibilities with Blast-specific features like our custom popup galleries, before we install it on the main magazine.

San Francisco, CA, August 26, 2008 – Technorati, the recognized leader in blog search technology today announced the acquisition of Blogcritics.org, an online community of bloggers and a full service news and reviews source.
The award winning property hosts a community of more than 2,000 bloggers and authors that contribute hundreds of articles every week: news, opinions, and product reviews across entertainment, technology, and politics. The site also provides bloggers with an entry point to publish their content to a much broader audience than their own blogs afford.

“As part of Technorati Media, we’ll be able to grow the community and further improve our platform to attract new audiences,” said Eric Olsen, founder of Blogcritics. “Technorati’s mission to help bloggers and people who read blogs is the ideal complement for us.”

In addition to devoting resources to scaling the property and its operations, Technorati Media will seek to work more closely with Blogcritics authors so they can monetize their own blogs. Advertisers will benefit by the ability to run more fully integrated programs across the site and its related blogs.

“Together with the bloggers themselves, Blogcritics has successfully built a thriving community with an extensive following, and given bloggers what has become a very large forum in which to express themselves. We’re thrilled to help them realize their full potential,” said Richard Jalichandra, president and CEO of Technorati.

Blogcritics joined the Technorati Media Network in June. There are no plans to merge the two properties.

About Blogcritics
Blogcritics.org was founded in 2002 by veteran broadcaster and music journalist Eric Olsen. Originally conceived for music fanatics to write and post reviews online, the site quickly evolved and took on a life all its own. Hundreds of bloggers flocked to Blogcritics.org, and sections including politics, film, television, culture, and books were added to support a truly grassroots phenomenon. Product reviews came to be supplemented by news, interviews, and opinion articles. Writers and readers alike found kindred spirits online who were interested in both pop culture and the world at large. In 2005, online gaming, sports, and science/technology sections were added to the mix.

About Technorati
The recognized authority in the blogosphere, Technorati collects, organizes, highlights and distributes the online global conversation, surfacing this content to millions of consumers. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has become the definitive source for the top stories, opinions, photos and videos emerging across news, entertainment, technology, lifestyle, sports, politics and business. Technorati tracks not only the authority and influence of blogs, but also the most comprehensive and current index of who and what is most popular in the blogosphere.

For about a year now, we’ve been using IX Web Hosting as an inexpensive solution to our very simple web hosting needs — three domains powered by WordPress. After all, we don’t have any key sponsors, and I fund Blast with my own money when it isn’t making its own cash.

It’s been a disaster. We are no longer using IX Web Hosting.

One of the last straws came when one of their technical support agents reminded me how little we were paying for their services.

Yes, you do get what you pay for.

This week, we upgraded to a private server and a different SQL server. We will be on a virtual private SQL server in a few days, and there will be virtually no downtime while our new hosting provider plugs everything in.

IX Web Hosting subjected us to a SQL server was was down due to abuse nearly every day and that — as you all know — was extremely slow and often unresponsive, even when it wasn’t being abused.

Then we found out that some of the RSS feeds on BlastMagazineBlogs.com had been hacked — spam code and links inserted.

The unreliability, poor service, poor servers and poor security of IX Web Hosting forced me to decide to allocate much more money for a new server. Whatever. We’re producing a great product here, and I want it to succeed. This is a move we should have made on January 1, 2007, when we launched.

Though, if you want to sponsor us, that might make me feel better.

Effective immediately, we are ceasing the “Quick hits” portion of our
tech reviews.

We will be replacing it with a shorter fact box on the top of our
reviews, much like what we’re doing with CD reviews.

Example:

Information needed: Genre, Developer/Distributor, Release date, and an
OVERALL 1-5 star rating

Make sure you read!

We have launched a beta version of our new website design.

It’s VERY important that you all look at it, leave tons of comments and find anything that looks bad, is broken or inconsistent — we’re counting on you!

In other news — I’m very proud to announce two staff moves:

Bessie King, one our ace reporters has been elevated to Entertainment Editor where she will deploy her writing, editing and recruiting skills to develop a section that has a ton of promise and needs some TLC.

Samantha Lavine, an original Blast Magazine reporter will edit the Kinky Stuff side of our Culture Section and “put out” cutting edge writing and reporting on some edgy topics.

Keep up the good work!

John

Let’s all congratulate Dan Peleschuk for having the main story on page one of The Boston Globe today!

It’s not the happiest article in the world, but its excellent reporting and writing showing just how amazing our humble Culture Editor is.

From now on when we do reviews, you need to put the following info … for example:

Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.
Developer: Level-5 Inc.
Platform: Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PSP, DS, GBA, PC, MAC, Linux
Genre: Strategy/RPG
Players: Single-player
Launch Date: August 2007

We’re changing domains right now from theblastarea.com to blastmagazine.com. Theblastarea.com will forward to blastmagazine.com in a few hours once its processed.

Congrats on this huge step for our company!