The Internet may be producing an excess of penguin sweaters

[jhbadger]

Personally I prefer them canned in mustard sauce

[GilbertWham]

Penguin confit? Well, I’ll try it, absolutely.

[WearySky]

@Grasshopper

Milk bag mats aren’t any more useful than pop tabs. Lots of work and effort goes into them and they are thrown out when they arrive at the destination.

Well, as mentioned above, at least in certain parts those pop tabs do serve a noble purpose.

[brian_alto]

Yup - perfect Internet meme; cute animals in need of help. A lot of my FB friends reposted the Guardian story, but as with most of the UK tabloid articles, I thought “caveat lector”. Yes, I realize that your post was more a caution than an account of the current situation, but still. People do react passionately to a good story - witness the proliferation of “If I can get 10,000 likes, I can get this life-saving surgery” social media appeals. Unlike those, the penguin story doesn’t seem to enrich anyone in particular, but trolls and scammers also notice this stuff. Maybe there’s a market for marked-up penguin-sized sweaters?

You know, internet appeals might be a force for good in a world where individual voices seem to be unheard by the powers that be. But you know they’re gonna be mined by grifters and scammers. Dunno where the solution lies. Crowd-sourcing has been quite successful in many cases. But perhaps the folks that contribute to crowd-sourced projects are more internet savvy than your aunt/uncle/old high-school pal knitting a sweater for a penguin.

(btw, I’m in the Twin Cities - if you guys ever have any sort of local BoingBoing meetup, I’d like to get the chance to chat with you.)