SoapBlox grew out of Scoop, the software used on DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas's left-of-center superblog. Paul Preston, its developer, found himself running 25 different sites — the likes of My Left Wing, Blue Hampshire, West Michigan Rising, and Swing State Project. (All politics is local!)

And yet SoapBlox remained a one-man band. So when still-unidentified hackers infiltrated SoapBlox's servers, causing them to be taken offline, Preston despaired:

(+) SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
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January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST
It was a good ride, but it's over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don't have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the "We're Out of Business" post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox's ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

Since then, a groundswell of grassroots support has lifted Preston's spirits, and he's working on restoring the service. But how did so many sites come to depend on such a fragile operation in the first place? One argument is that other blogging services didn't offer SoapBlox's features, like the ability to feature a casual user's contributions on a site's homepage with a single click.

That's hardly true: Drupal, a popular piece of software used on Fast Company's website, has long offered a similar tool, as do the latest versions of Movable Type and WordPress. But what SoapBlox offered that they lacked was the comfort of familiarity, and DailyKos's stamp of approval.

For its liberal bloggers, too lazy to research alternatives, it was the — how to put it? — politically correct way to publish. And why should they have bothered looking elsewhere, since it was a fine choice for their purposes? But I suspect their 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.

• Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
• Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
• Max Levchin, Slide
• Robin Li, Baidu
• Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
• Elon Musk, SpaceX
• Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
• Mika Salmi, MTV
• Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
• Quincy Smith, CBS
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
• Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
• Evan Williams, Twitter
• Andrew Zolli, PopTech

Top 30 Online Current Events & Global News Destinations, ranked by Sessions per Person
Brand or channel; sessions per person; unique audience (000)
1. drudgereport.com; 19.9; 3,445
2. Daily Kos^; 8.9; 1,204
3. Fox News Digital Network; 8.3; 10,177
4. CNN Digital Network; 7.9; 37,181
5. AOL News; 7.7; 21,119
6. Yahoo! News; 7.4; 35,274
7. MSNBC Digital Network; 6.4; 34,013
8. ksl.com^; 6.0; 796
9. Breitbart.com; 5.3; 2,674
10. Google News; 5.3; 12,050
11. Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division; 5.1; 13,998
12. NYTimes.com; 4.9; 18,975
13. Netscape; 4.8; 2,709
14. Townhall.com; 4.7; 1,152
15. Media General Newspapers; 4.6; 1,761
16. GTGI Network 4.5; 1,345
17. Star Tribune; 4.3; 2,108
18. TWC News Websites; 4.1; 840
19. NewsMax.com; 4.0; 4,054
20. Zwire^; 3.9; 1,089
21. Cox Newspapers; 3.9; 5,197
22. washingtonpost.com; 3.8; 10,441
23. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; 3.8; 1,259
24. The Buffalo News^; 3.7; 502
25. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 3.6; 1,472
26. MediaNews Group Newspapers; 3.5; 5,850
27. USATODAY.com; 3.5; 10,571
28. WorldNow 3.5; 10,588
29. IB Websites; 3.4; 7,565
30. St. Louis Post Dispatch^; 3.4; 1,022

^ Indicates Home and Work audience duplication projections did not meet minimum sample size standards. Combined home and work audience estimates for these sites may exhibit increased variability month-to-month as a result.

This data, also from Nielsen Online, shows the monthly traffic and other data for newspaper-based Web sites for February 2008:

66,456,096 - monthly unique audience for newspaper sites, an increase of 13.2 percent (year over year)
41 percent - active reach, an increase of 9.4 percent (year over year)
3,064,613,644 - total page views on newspaper sites, an increase of 8.5 percent (year over year)
46.05 - page views per person

The day after the injunction, Wikileaks' web servers (hosted in Sweden by the company who used to host the world's most infamous site for illegal downloads, The Pirate Bay) caught fire. Apparently that's under control now, so you can still read secret documents like the US Rules of Engagement for Iraq, secret CIA funding for torture research, records of the U.S. violating the chemical weapons ban, FBI pedophile symbols, and operating procedure for Guantanamo.

(A technical note: What the government shut down was the domain, not the actual web host; if this happened to a bigger brand-name site, losing a domain could be devastating even if the site moved elsewhere. Plus this could lead to censorship of domain names themselves.)

Strangely, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legal org which basically exists to scream bloody murder about this sort of censorship, hasn't written a thing about the shutdown; not even a link on their blog. It'd be nice to see some attention, since if this shutdown goes unchallenged, it sets a precedent for shutting down sites at the whims of their critics. Which would put a slight crimp on Gawker's style!