A few people have been asking about my site Popvine.com, and wondering what happened to it. Well, after about a year I’ve decided to pull the plug and shut it down.

Popvine was a celebrity gossip aggregator that harvested RSS feeds from celebrity gossip sites, including perezhilton.com, popcrunch.com, celebritybabyblog.com, and several others. It provided the title, excerpt, image, and a link to the source.

When I initially launched the site my intentions were to build a well designed site that would treat my girlfriends celebrity gossip addiction. The site was recognized for its design by smashingmagazine.com and a few CSS galleries (win). I never anticipated the doubling of traffic month-over-month and the excitement the site would bring me. With traffic topping 100,000 unique visitors last month the site was becoming a big fat target. Within the last two months I received several cease and desist orders ranging from attorneys representing Madonna (magazine cover pic) to Jamie Foxx (penis pic). Apparently, a few of my sources used images that where infringing someone’s rights (fail).

With respect for the web, photographers, and my fellow designers, I decided that what Popvine had become, or what it was becoming was not the business I wanted to be in. In the beginning it was fun learning about building an aggregation site and watching it grow. But waiting for the next C&D sucked!

Who knows, maybe Popvine will rise from the deadpool someday.

Amazon today announced the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge - a contest for discovering the next hot start-up that leverages Amazon Web Services to build its infrastructure and business.

“To enter, developers, entrepreneurs, and start-ups begin by completing an online application by October 28, 2007. The Amazon judges’ panel will review all applications and choose five finalists, based on originality and creativity of the idea, likelihood of long-term success, how well it addresses a need in the marketplace, and implementation of pay-as-you-use Amazon Web Services. More…

After a short and sleepless holiday weekend, I reveal Jabberpop. If you don’t already know about this project, well then here you go. Jabberpop is a personal project that I did this past Labor Day weekend. My goal was to see if I could develop a site/application in less than 72 hours and still keep my sanity - one of those I did manage to do. My mission was simple and my time was short. I was not intending to come up with a groundbreaking idea, but rather challenge myself as a designer and a developer. More…