Australian Blog The Spin Starts Here, an institution in the Australian blogging world, has announced April 1 that it’s closing down.

In a post to TSSH readers, site owner Caz detailed that she had lost much of the passion she once had in running the site, and that the site has become to difficult to maintain.

Admittedly, given the posting date of April 1 I automatically presumed that it was an April Fools Day joke, however I’ve since received an email from Caz confirming that the site is shutting, and that the date was to “mess with peoples heads”.

The site has previously been described by leading Australian Media outlets previously as being “Repugnant and disturbing”, “Extraordinarily vicious” and “Foul mouthed [and] mildly offensive” (Daily Telegraph, The West & The Age in order), and is one of Australia’s longest running blogs, having been launched in 2002.

Its also been one of my favorite reads for many years, and it will be sorely missed, although admittedly given some of the flame wars I’ve been involved in there recently, it’s probably a positive for my health.

Caz writes that the domain will be handed over to regular contributor TeaLou, who plans to turn the site into a forum.

Originally posted on April 1, 2007 @ 1:00 am

Egyptian blogs are exposing voter fraud, with video taken via mobile phones showing ballot stuffing at the recent referendum giving the State more powers to crack down on Islamic dissent.

According to The Peninsula,

A handful of video clips, most of which appear to be taken by mobile phone cameras and circulated on Egyptian blogs and websites, contain some of the first images of alleged fraud in the vote and could reinforce the accusations of vote fixing…In one of three clips viewed by Reuters, a man purported to be an election official in the Nile Delta appears to mark names on a voter list, then folds a pile of ballots and stuffs them into a transparent vote box. A close-up of one of the ballots shows it is marked with a “Yes” vote.

Originally posted on March 30, 2007 @ 2:24 am

You’d think they’d be setup to handle the traffic?

Or is it ironic that a site with a reputation of bringing down other sites is partially down itself?

(shot taken at 10:25pm US EST 28 Mar 07)

Originally posted on March 28, 2007 @ 7:26 pm

Leading Worldwide record company SonyBMG has announced that effective April 2 it will no longer accept demo tapes/ CDs from aspiring artists, and in turn will now only consider applications from musicians who blog their wares.

The move is effectively the death of the demo tape, the well trodden path to a recording contract over the last 40-50 years.

SonyBMG UK and Ireland Music Entertainment chair and chief executive Ged Doherty says the company was moving with the times.

“Blogging is clearly one of the major trends in music, media and entertainment…So it makes complete sense for the major labels to use the process in a creative way to encourage, discover and communicate with new artists.”

Vale the Demo Tape. Killed by Blogging in 2007.

(via ABC)

Originally posted on April 1, 2007 @ 8:22 pm

The Ying and Yang of the startup business.

Michael Arrington has announced that TechCrunch has acquired famed Web 1.0 failures site Fucked Company in a script for assets deal.

Arrington says on the deal:

Since FC focuses on the negative news coming out of startups, and TechCrunch tends to focus on the positive, this combination may seem odd. But the sites are in fact extremely complementary. For example, the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap. So from day one we will double our reach and traffic.

To be honest I wouldn’t have visited Fucked Company in maybe 4-5 years, and am surprised it was even still going, and yet Arrington getting into the dead pool game is a sure sign that the boom is on the way out and that TechCrunch is going to have less and less positive start up stories to blog about….indeed remember 31 March, it could become one of those tipping point days in the history of Web 2.0, where the lead cheerleader for Web 2.0 went negative by acquisition.

Update: suggestions elsewhere + in the comments here that this is a April Fools Day joke from Arrington. Dave Winer seems to think it is, but the post is dated 31 March, not April 1, and as far as I can remember, jokes on March 31 don’t count as April fools day jokes. If it is a joke, Phillip Kaplan is in on it given the intro splash page at Fucked Company has a “big news” intro and a TechCrunch style logo for the site. Time will tell I guess, but oddly enough I still think the acquisition makes a lot of sense, even if it is a big joke.

Originally posted on March 31, 2007 @ 5:18 pm