Blog P.I.

Forty-eight hours after the big meltdown, the blogs of SoapBlox are far from dead. In fact, of the sites Blog P.I. reported being offline on Wednesday morning, all are back online, archives seemingly intact.

As it turns out, the only website that seems any different is SoapBlox itself. Gone, for the moment, is the lengthy blogroll of mostly state-based liberal (and one conservative) blogs, as well as the archives. That’s too bad, because they provided some insight to the haphazard operation of Paul “pacified” Preston. One of the last posts in December featured a harried Preston threatening to shut down the blogs of any site operators more than two months behind on their bills. No word on if he followed through, and unfortunately the last year of SoapBlox is unfortunately missing from the Wayback Machine.

Instead, the most recent post is itself now twenty-four hours old — a press release from Preston not quite admitting he’d overreacted but sounding altogether more rational than midweek. Here’s an excerpt:

At this time, all services are returned to normal.

We have many wonderful people now volunteering to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Clean servers are being created, and existing sites will be migrated shortly on to these more secure servers.

Discussions are currently underway on how to best provide the SoapBlox service, continually improve it, and keep it funded in a way that keeps everything running smoothly. Soon we will be establishing a way for you to help provide whatever you are willing to keep SoapBlox–and a large chunk of the progressive blogosphere–safe, secure and constantly improving.

Please monitor SoapBlox.net for future announcements, and feel free to contact us at soapblox@gmail.com with any ideas or suggestions you might have. Everything is on the table.

I apologize with all of my heart for the events of the past two days–from the lack of proper communication, to not seeking help that so many of you are willing to give earlier.

And what of the rumors that site passwords across the network had been compromised? Beats me. I could be wrong, or they could be pressing ahead regardless. If I hear anything more definitive, Blog P.I. will cover it.

P.S. Thanks to Owen Thomas at Valleywag/Gawker for the link. He closes his post on the subject with this:

I suspect [liberal bloggers'] built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role. SoapBlox’s customers never bothered to ask whether Preston really had the financial resources to support it. That’s far too capitalist a question for the left-wing blogosphere to have pondered.

I don’t think I would chalk this up to antipathy to capitalism. I’d say it’s more a combination of deficiency of savvy and casual clubbiness. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter, how do we learn to blog? We learn to blog from what we read every day. Paul Preston is no Buffalo Bill, but it would behoove bloggers to look more closely at whom they’re trusting with the very websites that makes them bloggers.