Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Sandy Soaks Gawker, HuffPo, BuzzFeed

Instagram user @luch313

Tons of great Sandy coverage on the Web last night and this morning. Largely absent from the conversation, though, are three New York-based news/aggregation sites: BuzzFeed, Gawker and the Huffington Post.

All three publishers relied on Datagram, a Manhattan-based ISP, according to a BuzzFeed post published late last night. When that went down, so did their sites.

This morning, all three are making do with temporary fixes.

Huffington Post is running a bare-bones homepage (as Bruce Upbin notes, no nip-slip slideshows this morning); Gawker has reverted to its pre-redesign form; and BuzzFeed is relying on individual Tumblr accounts (see John Herrman’s excellent thumbsucker on instaTruth).

And all three sites, of course, are making excellent use of Twitter, which really had its moment last night: Best place to get the most information on the Web.

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus