Okay.
First, Leslie Harpold’s mind-blowingly good “writing experiment” Hoopla disappears completely from the Web. Chalk it up to the complete idiocy of Network Solutions - they apparently sold the domain to another person by accident (!). And now that person, as far as I can tell, has refused to give it back.
Now, it seems that Alison Headley’s smartly-written journal bluishorange has also pulled a vanishing act. Repeated domain lookups have proved fruitless, but at least from the WHOIS it seems she still owns it (thank goodness). I’ve noticed, however, that the whois puts her domain as expired Feb. 12th of this year - could she have forgotten to pay for the renewal? Yikes.
Conspiracy, or rampant stupidity (on the part of registrars, not the bloggers)? Or are my ISPs domain name servers just totally oblivious?
Update: Dean Allen’s Textism has some of the skinny on the hoopla.com hoopla: here, and then an update here. There’s a rather large and ongoing MetaFilter thread that Leslie has been contributing to. And Cory at BoingBoing says, “Let’s put NetSol to death.”. Hear hear. I am very angry.
