From the 700 Hoboes website:
In the beginning, there were hoboes. Then, a notable non-historian wrote some lies about them in his wonderful and wholly inaccurate almanac. That man was John Hodgman. The book was The Areas of My Expertise. Amongst the lies was a comprehensive list of notable historical hobo names, numbering 700. After Hodgman read the list into a music flattening device, one Mr. Mark Frauenfelder of the Boing Boing teletyped a suggestion that 700 cartoonists volunteer to draw one hobo each as a public service or for no particular reason. And so it was, more or less, and here they are.
In March of 2006, 65 years after the end of the Hobo Wars, several members of the 700 Hoboes project decided to build a new, majestic home for these noble hoboes. Len Peralta quickly came up with a wonderful design for the site. He passed the design on to Dan Coulter who built a back end system using phpFlickr, his open source wrapper for Flickr’s API. Also, Adam Koford, Mike Peterson, Ben Rollman, and Eric Vespoor all contributed greatly to the making of this website. Special thanks to John Hodgman for giving us his blessing on this interpretation of his brilliant creation.
More here.