It may be a relatively unknown blogging platform, but for sure, the users of Blogetery.com were not happy when they got shut down earlier this month. There were apparently more than 70,000 blogs in the platform when they were denied service by their web hosting company, Burst.net.

As was expected, the sudden shutdown created a bit of noise online. Why did they do it? Why the harsh reaction? There were many speculations, and wasn’t till last week that the real reasons came out.

Apparently, the FBI did have a hand in it, as many were speculating. However, the government agency did not request for the shutting down of the blogging platform. The information that they gave Burst.net was that there were links to al-Qaeda material found on Blogetery’s servers. More so, it seems that there were also assassination lists – with American citizens in them. Aside from that, they also found messages from Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, as well as bomb-making tips.

Upon receiving the information, Burst.net decided to terminate the access of Blogetery on its own. That’s the official announcement. Legally speaking, the information discovered can be classified as a violation of the web hosting company’s terms of service, and they had the right to suspend access. More so, it is said that the owner of Blogetery has had received multiple warnings since December, prompting the suspension of his account. No details have been released as to the identification of the owner.

On another note, another service called Ipbfree.com has also been suspended – a mere few days after the Blogetery shutdown. No information has been released regarding this.

Geocities was one of those free internet services that, to my mind, really contributed to the explosive growth of the internet. It was also instrumental for many kids learning how to build their own websites.

But as with all things electronic or internet-based — its existence is fleeting even though its impact was undeniably massive. Yahoo!, who acquired the service in 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock, has announced that it will be closing the web hosting service on October 26, 2009 — and with it another chapter in the still morphing life of the internet.

The sobering note said that by the aforementioned date “your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

“If you’d like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you’ve posted online, please act now by downloading your files or upgrading to Yahoo! Web Hosting.”

It’s really quite sad to see another pioneer shutting down. Geocities, at its height, was THE place to be. AEveryone wanted to build their own websites and Geocities was the place to put them in. Geocities was also considered the first online community (remember those webrings?) — the larval stage of what will eventually become the social networking phenomenon that we see today.

Goodbye, Geocities.

The ReadWriteWeb network has disbanded, jettisoning its AltSearchEngines and last100 blogs. According to RWW’s Richard McManus, the decision was made in order for RWW to focus on building and extending their core brand.

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

I will retain a personal stake in both AltSearchEngines and last100, but as of 1 November they are under the majority ownership of Charles Knight (AltSearchEngines) and Steve O’Hear (last100). I’d like to thank Charles and Steve for putting in so much effort to build up AltSearchEngines and last100 respectively. Both have done a great job covering their respective niches and we wish them all the best in continuing to grow the sites.

Read the RWW announcement.

Our sister site The Blog Herad reports that UK-based blog network Shiny Media is actively looking for a buyer for its Who Ate All the Pies English football blog:

Several of Shiny’s other sports blogs have been retired over the past year, with the main reasons being the difficulty of monetizing them, when compared to Shiny’s core technology- and fashion-related sites, and various administrative strains.

Read the full report here.

Syntagma Media’s John Evans has published an article on the recent hardships endured by blog networks, which are tied to the economic downturn.

So what has the title of our post got to do with that? Well, that’s Evans’ answer to a timely question: What to do if you’ve invested heavily in an internet business, such as a blog network?

Evans writes:

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

Read the full post at Syntagma.

The Blog Herald reports that in just two days, the Know More Media will cease to exist as a blog network:

Know More Media will be closing its doors as of August 1, according to editor Easton Ellsworth, who confirmed the open letter from b5media’s Jeremy Wright to the KMM bloggers.

Ellsworth confirmed this in his blog comment:

Unless something drastic changes in the next few days, the Know More network will be “no more.” The blogs will remain online and the authors may choose to continue to post, but we will no longer be able to pay them. We simply ran out of revenue.

We’re sad to see KMM go, but as Ellsworth says, “things are born, grow and die, sometimes giving birth to other things.” Best of luck to Ellsworth and all KMM bloggers.

Finding no sense in continuing the ever flopping world of Yahoo photos, rumor has it that this portion of the search engine empire will be shutting down soon in favor of Flickr, a growingly popular photo image hosting site.

Yahoo photos was never really able to reach and achieve its goals. A lot of players entered the scene such as Flickr and sad to note that they had done much better as far as performance and preference is to be gauged. Hopefully, people would be aware of this soon since there are still people who use them and are totally unaware of the impending shutdown of the Yahoo Photo category.

The news is out (all over the place) that Yahoo is shutting down its stumbling Yahoo Photos site in favor of Flickr. But unless you’re read the tech blogs, you wouldn’t know it.

Here we are more than 12 hours after the news broke, and there’s no announcement on Yahoo Photos, Flickr’s news page, the Flickr blog or any Yahoo site. I’m a member of both photo services, and I haven’t received an e-mail or seen a blog post. What gives, Yahoo? Why are you keeping your users in the dark?

I don’t have many pictures in my Yahoo Photos account (I switched to Flickr long ago) but I do have some photos there. What’s going to happen to them? Am I going to have to migrate them to Flickr myself? More importantly, what steps is Yahoo going to take to ensure I don’t lose any photos in the migration?

Updated @ 3:19 PDT: Still no e-mail announcement, but Yahoo has posted migration instructions for Yahoo Photos users. See our post on the topic. – Hey, Yahoo — What’s Gonna Happen To My Photos?

[tags]yahoo photos, flickr, yahoo photos shutdown, yahoo photos migration, yahoo photos closure[/tags]

Weblogs, Inc. has closed their Digital Photography Weblog:

The Digital Photography Weblog is retiring. This is a sad development (heh — see what I did there?) for loyal readers, but fits right in with the evolution of Weblogs Inc. This blog will remain archived for reference and searching.

In a comment left over at Problogger, Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis provides some thoughts in the comments, including this closing paragraph, which tells the real story:

bottom line: we are in phase two at WIN, and phase two is about scale. We knnow we can make money, the question is can we scale this business to a LOT of money. Like move the needle at AOL money–and we’re on the way.

Jack of All Blogs, once owned by David Krug has moved over to The Bloggy Network, having been acquired by that network.

There’s some noise about this move from many audiences – David has his piece here, the new owners here, Dan Azrrella here, and some others weigh in as well: Gonzo Musings, Chartreuse (see the comments)

BlogMedia is selling their SEO Memo blog. Details also at dnforum for DN Platinum account holders.