. The third item down (as of this writing) is a piece about whispers going around that Automatic-Media is in trouble. Of course Automatic-Media is the year-old umbrella that includes Suck and Feed, plus Plastic.

The sad thing for me is that it’s not really a shock. We’ve been hearing stories like this for ages now – even though this one doesn’t seem to include the otherwise required extravagance. That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be a tremendous loss, though, either.

It’s not fashionable to say, but a whole lot of the web can be traced back directly to Suck, for instance. If it were a rock and roll family tree, Suck would be Robert Johnson or someone – not always remembered, but totally fundamental. Feed would be… who? Well except for the temporal inconsistency with the above, maybe the Velvet Underground or someone – geeky, art-schoolish, but at the very heart of things in important ways.

Newer web people (and old ones too) might think I’m over-stating it, and maybe I am. But still. It’s the old fogey thing to say, but you had to be there when Suck launched. It was a wild time – no names (though Carl and Joey’s authorship was a poorly-kept secret, which was certainly intentional), no lame business model to muddy things. No ugly colour scheme, no gee-whiz graphics save for the title itself.

I hope these are just rumours and that they can work it out if not.