The blog post title says it all. My memory fails me as to the exact date the popular blog – StartupsNigeria.com went offline. There could have been several reasons why it was offline but one day, two days, one week… the site was still offline. I started to get a bit concerned. I began to hear rumors, but then, they were rumors and so paid little or no attention to them.

Afterwards, in discussing with the editor of the blog – Loy Okezie, I got informed that the site went offline due to a “conflict of interest” and yada yada.

I left it at that and celebrated with Loy Okezie when he launched StartupsNigeria.org. Updates on StartupsNigeria.org have been posted by Loy Okezie on his personal blog.

As things will take a different turn, I just got an IM from a colleague a few hours ago who drew my attention to a new blog post by Vic on the whole issue. After reading the blog post, I was more confused but more sad than confused about what the true story had been from the beginning. Right now, I’m so sad about seeing a very promising blog run down like this. Like Ope Awo wrote in his blog post on this, Loy Okezie was really building a brand of the types of Michael Arrington with Techcrunch but issues with integrity can really bring down an entire empire. I’m really sad about this whole development but hey I’m glad to see the impact the site had made while Loy was at its helms.

StartupsNigeria.com will never be the same again; nevertheless, it will not be a deterrent to the Internet revolution in Nigeria.