I’ll never cease to be amazing at how fast and perceptive the blogosphere is. Right as I’m writing a blog post about HackADay not being part of the AOL deal someone picks up on it!

So, it’s true HackADay wasn’t part of the deal to go to AOL. This was a choice that Brian and I made when we did the deal. Our thinking was that HackADay frequently gets itself into hot water doing things like voiding warranties, unlocking DRM schemes, and the like. This is what makes HackADay a success in factit’s unfiltered and no one tells them to stop doing what they’re doing. In fact, we’ve encouraged them to be ummm. “creative.”

Brian and I felt it would only be a matter of time before someone posted (in a blog post or a comment) “how to hack your INSERT_AOL_product_here” or “How to hack INSERT_AOL_partner_product_here.” If and when this happened we would wind up fighting with ourselves, and Brian and I thought we should just preempt that and avoid the headache.

In fact, being part of AOL would make it open season on them and their partners, just like hacking HackaDay and Weblogs, Inc. became a pastime for the HackADay readers. They took site down twice in factall in good fun of course.

We told AOL it wasn’t for sale, and after hearing our thoughts they respected them and let us keep HackADay indie. We’re going to run it as is for now outside of Weblogs, Inc. as a side project and eventually we’ll probably make it a non-profit with the profits going to the EFF. We’re open on suggestions of what we should do with it.

(Note: The amazing bloggers on it still blog on Engadget, TUAW, and other WIN blogs so no one is losing their job or anything.)