Blog.cz

» see blog.cz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkey had Blogcu and the Czech Republic had Blog.cz, and the two ran almost the same fifteen years on almost the same model: free hosting under a subdomain with your name on it, and a teenage population that treated the whole arrangement as a diary left deliberately unlocked. I never read a word of Blog.cz. I can read its shape from a long way off.

It went live overnight between 3 and 4 August 2005, out of Michal Illich's company Jyxo, which also ran a Czech search engine under its own name. Bloguje.cz had the more technical crowd. Blog.cz took the people who wanted to type something and have it appear, which turned out to be most of them.

The numbers it reached in a country of about ten and a half million people are the part worth sitting with. By September 2010 it carried somewhere around eight hundred thousand blogs against nearly two million registered accounts. Not all of those were live and not all of them were separate humans, but even discounted hard, a meaningful slice of an entire national cohort had an account on one website.

~ the chronicle ~

~ who was actually on it ~

Mostly teenagers, and mostly girls, writing the kind of entry that assumes an audience of four people and gets read by two hundred. The homepage leaned into it: the promo boxes in the archived captures advertise a Miss Blog.cz contest alongside a blog of the year award. It behaved less like a publishing tool and more like a youth magazine that happened to let readers write the pages.

~ the sale ~

In 2008 CME, the broadcaster that owned TV Nova, bought Jyxo and its projects for close to two hundred million Czech crowns. Blog.cz went from a founder's product to one line in a television company's web portfolio.

You can see what that did by reading the footer of a late capture. By 2019 the bottom of the Blog.cz homepage was a row of sibling brands from the same group, pointing at the broadcaster's news site and at its own domain. The blogging platform had become a traffic source for properties that mattered more to the owner than it did.

~ the last month ~

From 15 July 2020 you could no longer start a blog or register an account. Everyone already there had until 16 August to download their posts and their images, and on that date both Blog.cz and its photo gallery twin Galerie.cz went off. The operator's public reason was that the platform no longer matched what people expected, which is a polite way of saying the fifteen year olds had gone to Instagram and to video and were not writing paragraphs anymore.

~ what the redirect says ~

Type blog.cz today and you land on tn.nova.cz, the broadcaster's news portal. There is no memorial page at the other end, just an asset being pointed at a surviving property in the same group.

The capture record keeps the shape of it better than the redirect does. The Internet Archive has the Blog.cz homepage at 8,011 bytes on 20 January 2020 and at 2,327 bytes on 1 January 2021, which is a front page turning into a notice and then into whatever the domain was worth to somebody else.

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