Today, we're shutting down Westmonster, our UK political website. Last month, we closed our other site, Glitterditch. So we're no longer in the digital publishing business, and we're focussing instead on digital consulting to the UK media, NGO, and advocacy sectors.

We're not taking the decision lightly, but the fact is that the audiences for these titles didn't warrant continued investment, particularly in the light of the advertising downturn the media sector is wrestling with.

When we launched last year, it was with the belief that there was an unserved niche for stylised reporting and content that fell between what the large media companies were doing, and what independent bloggers were providing. We're not saying that isn't true, but we are saying it's going to take significant amounts of investment in marketing and audience-building to build a business in there, for all sorts of reasons.

We've also found it really hard to recruit writing talent for the titles. We started with the working assumption that there was a significant tranche of young journalists in the UK willing to take a punt on a small publisher in return for increasing their own profile - we were offering pay, of course, but linked to audience and posting levels. What we found was that, at least at this point in time, those writers just don't seem to exist in any significant numbers in this country. While we were able to find some very dedicated and talented writers, the effective advertising CPM we'd have needed to pay them a reasonable wage only existed at an audience size orders of magnitude larger than we were able to achieve.

That said, we've had a lot of fun during our brief stint as media moguls. Despite the size of the audience, Westmonster in particular had moments where it punched well above its weight, attracting the attention of the traditional media and of the blogosphere.

To all of those who read and supported our titles, and particularly to those few intrepid writers who were willing to have a go, we'd like to extend our heartfelt thanks.

We're still working on things, separately and together, and MessyMedia does have a future. But not, for now, in digital publishing.

--Lloyd Shepherd & Andrew Levy, co-Managing Directors, MessyMedia

Sian's put some eye-popping stuff about professional seduction trainers on Glitterditch. There's a guy and a girl, would you believe it. The guy reckons he has the ability to make a woman fall in love with him. The girl's launching a singing career. Of course.

Westmonster is featured today in Comment Is Free's "Best of the Web", for a post on the nationalisation of Northern Rock. Is there life on Mars?

I have my views on Microsoft swallowing Yahoo! - but none of them are as articulate or smart as those from my ex-Yahoo! colleague Alan Jones:

Microsoft's web technologies are as unrelated to Yahoo!'s as the Dark and Light sides of the Force. Before you even begin your Comp. Sci. degree you've already made a decision to join one camp or the other. There's no love lost between the two sides, and very few developers jump from one camp to the other mid-career.

Perl, PHP and Ruby developers carry PowerBooks with startup stickers on them, ride a bicycle and wear a tee and jeans. They are too skinny. They are more likely to have an iPod earbud in their ear than a phone.  Microsoft developers wear chinos and a business shirt or collared tee, carry a black generic laptop identical to their coworkers. They are a little overweight, but only because they have a good wife at home who loves to cook. They have a full schedule of meetings and tasks always with them in their Exchange-connected phone, which they carry in a leather holster on their belt, with a blinking-blue Bluetooth headset always jammed in their ear. They think the Zune is "kinda cool" but like a quiet working environment (Frank, I love you anyway man).

So the only way to borg Yahoo!s products and get them running an all-Microsoft backend would be across the vacant desks of the various Yahoo! development teams, vacant because you'd either fired them or they'd beaten you to it and taken a job elsewhere. The number of senior developers with prior experience migrating global-grade FreeBSD/Apache/Perl platforms to .NET would be approaching zero. I can't see Flickr running on .NET, ever.

Head-scratching:

News International backs online fashion store BrandAlley | Media | guardian.co.uk:

News International, the parent company of newspapers such as The Times and News of the World, has made a multimillion-pound investment in an online fashion company. The joint venture with French online boutique BrandAlley aims to be a luxury "private members' club" selling women's and men's clothing.

Why? This sounds like boo.com for millionaires.

We're soft-launching our second blog today: Glitterditch. It's dark, it's sleazy, it's London. This from the intro:

We're here to babble about London's most scandalous. Glitterditch will keep you up to date with who's doing what when they shouldn't be (and where you can see them doing it). We'll leave no party invitation unturned.

It's being written by the brilliantly talented (and occasionally sober) Sian Meades. You can read her bio here. Any feedback, please do drop us a line.

When we set up MessyMedia, it was always our hope to do two things: publish our own titles, and help other people publish theirs. For the last few weeks it's been the latter that has been occupying our time.

Yesterday we launched two sites we've built for Tony Blair's office: his Office site, and the site for his newly-launched Sports Foundation. Both are in keeping with our overall ethos - building content-based sites on flexible, widely-available platforms (in this case, both sites are built on Movable Type).

Also, a quick plug for Positive Internet, who are providing the hosting and who have been a pleasure to work with.

We've got some sites of our own to launch now - more news soon!

Hopefully the first of many: this nice note from Tom Watson MP:

More funny than Paul Delaire Staines at Guido, less obsequious than Iain Dale, more informative than Labour home, less partisan than me - I am very much enjoying Westmonster.

Couldn't have put it better ourselves!