Sploid, a flashy, gossipy entry from the Nick Denton blog factory, bit the dust this week after Denton failed to find a buyer. It’s not the first time Denton has dumped a web site that didn’t meet his immediate expectations of fast bucks but this time the execution involved a friend — Ken Layne, Sploid’s editor.

As Ken writes in Spoid’s farewell:

Just like YouTube, Lebanon, Joe Lieberman, newspaper circulation and airline travel, Sploid is being demolished.

It is a great victory for bullshit peddlers everywhere … if they had any idea Sploid existed.

Shut down, laid off, on the nickel, run out of town, shown the door, eighty-sixed, suicided, under heavy manners, finaled by the fuzz, down in the hole, out of the groove, sadder than a map, under the Hoover blankets, taking a bank holiday, riding the rails to Hungry Town, brought down and fought down.

Winners write the history books, but anybody can write the blog post. So get right up close to your computer screen and we’ll tell you a little story.

I met Ken Layne during his time in Washington working for United Press International, another doomed enterprise. Ken was one of the early pioneers of Internet news, having started tabloid.net, a web publication since lost in the dustbins of cyber-history. He and Matt Welch also started the LA Examiner, which died, reborn and died again.

Ken was kind enough to link to one of my web sites, Capitol Hill Blue during its early days and that link helped drive traffic to our site. Matt wrote a nice piece about Blue for some trade publication that is also long gone and that helped the site grow and prosper.

Tabloid.net is gone. So, now, is Spoid. Matt works for the editorial page of The Los Angeles Times. Ken, I know, will rebound. He always does. But Sploid was one of my daily reads. It will be missed.