This is the first of our occasional posts on Australian web, tech and related news.

TPN Broke: The Podcast Network, the first podcast network on the planet is in dire financial straights. The company is unable to meet its monthly hosting bill and is soliciting donations, needing $3,000 to keep the door open…until next month.

The network had a difficult 2008, first suffering a hacking after security patches weren’t applied to WordPress installs, then in December losing the majority of its back catalog when a server failed.

Wikileaks Censored: pages on Wikileaks has been censored in Australia, although technically there’s no way to enforce the ban…yet. The pages banned relate to a list of banned sites from the censorship regime in Denmark (ironic really). To make matters worse, the Australian Communications Media Authority is threatening sites with a $11,000 AUD fine per day if they link to the page on Wikileaks.

I’m not going to link to the page, even if this site is hosted in the US, however you can read Wikileak’s response to the ban here. In Australia, it’s illegal to link to content that might be illegal, even when you haven’t published the content yourself. Proto-fascism cometh.

Fake Stephen Conroy outed: Australia’s favorite Twitter imposter Fake Stephen Conroy has been outed as Telstra engineer Leslie Nasaar. Telstra, who’s as popular as herpes in Australia, have naturally reacted in their usual fashion, which is to force the account offline and shut everyone up. Still, at least they haven’t sacked him yet, the fate handed to one worker/ blogger a couple of years back who dared to speak the truth on Telstra’s corporate blog.

Oz Wrap: TPN Broke, Wikileaks Censored, Fake Stephen Conroy outed is a post from: The Inquisitr

In an email to TPN podcasters, CEO Cameron Reilly stated that the main hard drive on the network’s server in Texas suffered a “massive technical failure” and that data on the drive is unrecoverable. In a subsequent email, Reilly stated that while backups were available for show blog posts and comments, there is no backup of site architecture, stats or media; or in other words, their entire archive of podcasts is gone.

Reilly went on to say that blogs/ landing pages for each show on the network would be rebuilt, but appealed to network members for archival recordings of old shows, or “if not, we’ll have to ask the audience if they have archived copies.”

TPN has had a difficult year, with the network being hacked earlier this year due to an old version of WordPress being run, causing widespread outages and some discontent among its podcasters. A number of podcasters left the network after the earlier issues.

I’ve asked Cameron Reilly for his comment on the outage and we’ll update the post if we get a response.

From the outside though I’d think a loss of data along these lines would be a serious issue for any company. That they were not backed up externally, or that they were archived on a single hard drive to begin with may suggest that the company may have already fallen on hard times after having claimed at one stage to be delivering 800,000 podcasts a month (total downloads) on 8 million page views across the network. TPN was the worlds first podcast network, and I know I’m not alone in thinking its sad to see it in this state, and we wish Cameron the best in his attempts to survive through this difficult time.

The Podcast Network suffers major outage is a post from: The Inquisitr