Blogcu.com

» see blogcu.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Turkish blogging in the middle 2000s split along a line that had nothing to do with writing. On one side were people who wanted a domain and a database. On the other were people who wanted a text box, and Blogcu was the text box.

BerilTech launched it in 2005. Webrazzi, writing about it in 2008, described it as the first blog service in the country, which is a claim nobody in Turkish tech press has since bothered to dispute. Nokta A.Ş. bought it on 2 April 2007, back when Nokta was assembling a portfolio of Turkish user-content properties and had the money to do it. The service was free and in Turkish, and it asked for a username instead of a hosting plan.

It worked well enough that by October 2012 Alexa put it 44th in Turkey and 2,930th in the world. Behind that number were about 370,000 registered members and roughly 2.5 million posts, which is a lot of writing for a country that had only had consumer broadband for six years. The archive's last working front page, from 1 April 2020, is still exactly that: a post about why municipal libraries matter in Konya, then a Turgut Uyar poem somebody typed out in lowercase.

My own writing from those years went into forum threads instead. That was the other Turkish habit of the period, and it is the one I had, hardware talk on the big boards with a signature block listing what was in my case. Blogcu was for people who wanted a page of their own without becoming an administrator of anything, which is a completely reasonable thing to want and not what I wanted.

~ the case file ~

~ the nokta years ~

Nokta ran it through the period when a Turkish portal could still believe it would be the local answer to whatever was winning in English. Blogcu got a video section and a category tree deep enough to hold everything from religion to wedding planning. In October 2009 the whole thing was rebuilt and pushed out as a public test.

What it never got was a reason to survive Facebook. The Turkish writer who wanted an audience found one on Facebook around 2009 and then on Twitter, and the writer who wanted a diary found the same thing everyone else did, which is that a diary nobody visits does not need a platform behind it. The posts kept accumulating anyway, because a free blog service with no cost to the writer never really stops. It just stops mattering.

~ the day the switch flipped ~

The date everybody repeats for the ending is 1 July 2020, and the archive agrees with it. There are complete front pages captured on 1 March and 1 April 2020. The capture attempt on 1 July returns a redirect and nothing behind it, and every capture after that is a few hundred bytes.

No announcement went out. Turkish Wikipedia marks the site passive as of that date and says only that it was closed to access. The complaint pages filled up with the same message written by different people, which is that content added years ago was suddenly unreachable and nobody had said anything. Today the domain resolves to a parked lander that serves a JavaScript redirect, which is what a name looks like when it is being kept for resale rather than for its contents.

~ what was actually lost ~

About 2.5 million posts, written mostly by people who were not writers, in a language that machine translation was bad at until recently. Some of it is in the Internet Archive because somebody happened to crawl a URL. Most of it is not, because a crawler follows links and nobody links to a stranger's 2007 recipe blog.

That is the part worth being annoyed about. A blog host is a custodian by definition, since the whole pitch is that you do not have to keep the machine running. Fifteen years of that pitch ended with a silent DNS change, and the date only survives because Turkish Wikipedia bothered to write it down.

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