Wow! It's very nice that you are investigating the spintop history like that! I have the feeling one day you could take my place (when I turn 100)
I'm surprised the Wayback Machine stored the actual videos.
Q. 1 In all of the Herman Lau videos, the background is some pizza place, with a bunch of yoyo stuff going on. I even saw Steve Brown in the background. Where was this place, and why was Herman Lau at a yoyo event?
I believe all those videos were taken at a meeting of the Bay Area yo-yo club in 2000.
At that time the top and yo-yo scenes were the same.
Those videos of Herman in the pizza place were very important. From just those few seconds I figured out what the tricks Sewing Machine and Joker Choker were and recorded the ones that appear on ta0.com. I was expecting somebody to tell me I was wrong, but that never happened
Q. 2 What top was Herman Lau using? (besides what looked like a Bearing King)
I'm not sure. Herman used to play with the Monarch but it doesn't have the hole in the crown that he needs for the stick trick.
Q. 3 Who is this person?
Don't know.
Q. 4 What happened exactly to yoyoing.com and topspinning.com?
Before there was youtube, yoyoing.com was very important because it had a server that hosted the yo-yo videos. It's interesting to think if Greg Cohen (Infinite Illusions) had expanded from yoyoing to general videos it could have become youtube. When youtube started in 2005, people started to post there. But it was finished for good when the video server crashed and was off line for a long time.
Topspinning.com was one of two spintop forums, the other being Button and String, which was hosted by the Utah yo-yo club. I was posting on both, but much more on B&S. Eventually B&S was the one left with activity
, until the guy in charge, who did not play much tops, decided to stop. He offered the database and I considered hosting it on my site, but I thought it would have more visibility if Infinite Illusions hosted it, so I proposed that to Greg. So B&S became the new Topspinning.com forum. Eventually, after several interruptions in the service I decided to create a new forum and iTopSpin.com was born.