Bildirgeç

» see bildirgec.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I was a computer engineering student in Turkey for most of the years Bildirgeç was busy, which put me in the middle of the audience it wrote for: people on a home TTNet line who wanted the day's interesting links explained in Turkish. Writing about the web in Turkish was thin then. Forums like Donanım Haber covered hardware, and a site that pointed at FCKEditor in October 2006 or at 280 Slides in 2008, with two paragraphs on why it mattered, was filling a real hole.

A bildiri is a notice, and bildirgeç is a made-up word for the thing that delivers one. Members sent in short posts built around a link, and other members voted and commented. The capture of 30 January 2002 carries a counter line: 2,109 bildiri and 4,384 comments from 342 users, with 2,939 hits so far that day. The footer of the site claimed copyright from 1999, and the archive carries a post dated 1 November 1999, a complaint that Microsoft was fighting dirty with its "Linux Myths" page.

The site belonged to pillinetwork, a family of Turkish community sites. An Ekşi Sözlük entry from September 2002 lists hafif.org and bildirgec among its members. In the summer of 2004 the network wobbled. An entry of 6 July 2004 says Bildirgeç closed after hafif.org did, and would stay closed until Pilli found an administrator. Another entry, from 11 December 2004, reports it back online "five minutes ago".

The company behind it surfaced in the press only once in detail. On 26 April 2011 Webrazzi reported that Pilli's two partners for all those years, Hasan Yalçınkaya and Cem Başpınar, had each held half, and that Başpınar had sold his half to Yalçınkaya. The same article lists what else Pilli owned: a social network called sosyomat and put.io, the storage service, which is still running today.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ seventy percent to the writers ~

In March 2006 an Ekşi Sözlük entry described pillinetwork as the network that gives 70 percent of its advertising income back to its writers. The Bildirgeç front page of April 2006 agrees: a banner from pilli.com reads "gelir dağıtmaya başladık", we have started distributing revenue, and a note tells members to recover and merge their old accounts if they want the income from posts they wrote earlier. The tagline in those years was "Internet, tasarım ve mucizeleri", which promised the miracles of the internet and of design. By 2008 it had grown to take in popular culture and memes, and the footer listed sister sites for gadgets and cinema, among others.

~ a front page on shuffle ~

An Ekşi Sözlük entry of 22 December 2012 says the site was no longer paying its writers. The captures show what followed. In June 2013 the newest post on the front page is dated 24 January 2013, a biography of Juliette Lewis, and everything under it is from December 2012. The site had moved to WordPress by then, under the line "hersey internet insani icin", everything for the internet person.

No newer post ever appeared. By July 2016 the front page was serving old posts in random order, so that a notMac Challenge write-up from December 2006 sat above a one-line post about Sun and Microsoft from June 2002. The site ran like that for about three and a half years.

~ şuraya alalım ~

The last capture of the shuffled page is from 29 July 2016. On 10 August 2016 the whole site is one sentence: "Maalesef bildirgec.org kapandı, arşive erişmek isterseniz şuraya alalım", unfortunately bildirgec.org has closed, if you want the archive let us take you over here. In 2021 the address showed the front page of 10marifet, the network's handicraft site. Today it forwards to arsiv.pilli.com, which keeps 4,696 pages of Bildirgeç listings under a header that reads "Bir zamanların pilli network'ü", the pilli network of once upon a time.

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