Mystery of the disappearing blogs

Okay.

WhereohWhere 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.

Comments

1 | claus said on April 13, 2002 2:08 PM

ooops ... I accidentially pushed "cancel it" - and my comment was gone! now my second attempt: what i was trying to say is, that it's super-UNCOOL by NetSol to sell hoopla! to this guy in berlin! for a brief moment I even thought about phoning him (i live in germany as well) - but what would i say??? anyways, I WANT HOOPLA! BACK! claus

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2 | trev! said on April 13, 2002 3:11 PM

Just to let you know that I have had no problems getting to bluishorange's site. You may want to get onto your ISP and see what's up!

Sorry we missed you on your last trip here. See you soon, no?

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3 | alison said on April 13, 2002 7:52 PM
4 | rks said on April 15, 2002 8:50 PM

The idea that Leslie's url was sold out from under her is unbelievable. NetSol's lack of remedy is absolutely staggering.

I can't imagine that Hubert Sarah, or Sarah Hubert or whomever is blind to this situation and I really cannot imagine the response s/he will get from the internet community should s/he actually proceed to publish a site using the Hoopla domain.

Leslie's had a lot of wierd stuff happen lately, between this and the pirated stuff at enurv. I think it's high time for the cosmic dice to roll something good for her.

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