Some of you may remember that a while back I wrote about the consistent errors Amatomu is giving allot of us. Well after I wanted to rant again yesterday about how I now get greeted with the silly database error everytime I visit the site, I have seen that Amatomu finnaly confessed.

After visiting Amatomu just a while ago, the smerky database error page that made you the end user thought that you broke the site has now been replaced with a message stating that amatomu has reached its end at the Mail & Gardian.

Firstly, apologies for not communicating sooner about the site’s downtime. We were hoping to fix it sooner.

Amatomu has become too expensive for us to maintain and run, as it brings very little revenue, and bears a prohibitive cost for a company whose main product is news.

However, it’s obviously a great little product, and one that deserves to survive. To this end, we’ve offered it to a couple of interested parties. If we have no joy there, we’ll be offering it to the community to run as a community-based service.

Please bear with us as we fix it, and as we go through the process of transferring ownership. We will have clarity within the next five days.

Jason

Technical Manager

Mail & Guardian

Good luck to whoever buys Amatomu, I personaly think that it is a great service and can be changed to become profitable, specialy since there is so much interest in the site. Take Afrigator as an example, surely they are not running their blog aggregator at a los. I will be a firm supporter of Amatomu as soon as all the bugs get ironed out again and is stable enough.

Maybe a few of us web junkies should try and further Amatomu as a Community Project.

If you are a IRC junkie like I am you would know how ofthen someone says something that is realy funny or come acros funny in IRC.

If you have visited bash.org before you would know that it is a place where users can submit all these funny happenings that occurs across the IRC networks. The problem with bash.org is that it is mostly aimed towards American IRC networks and English.

Being in South Africa, we have several official languages and Afrikaans being one of the popular ones the South African webspace has signifigant grow for Afrikaans sites. This is where friend of mine, David Smit, saw the need for a afrikaans version of bash.org.

His site Pons.za.net, pons being the Afrikaans word for bash, went live last week and since then saw some interest in the site specialy from the WNet IRC network in South Africa. WNet is the IRC network for the local Wireless User Group communities of South Africa averaging about 300-400 active users at any time.

Main channels using pons.za.net currently includes #CTWUG and #PTAWUG on the WNet IRC Network where the majority of the users speak Afrikaans.

Owner of pons.za.net, David Smit, says that although he wrote pons.za.net mainly for afrikaans quotes any language is welcome aslong as the quote is South African of nature. Any quote is welcome to be submitted not just IRC quotes, users can submit msn, jabber, gtalk whatever chat protocol they use.

So head on over to pons.za.net and check out the quotes already submitted and why not submit your own funny or weird quotes.