Blogilista.fi

» see blogilista.fi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Blogilista started in 2005 as a spin-off from Pinseri, another Finnish site, and did the one job a country's blog scene needed doing: it kept the list. You could browse Finnish blogs by topic, sort them by how many readers they had, subscribe to the ones you liked and see when they updated. It was sold to Manta Ray Holdings the same year it launched, which is fast, and on 26 November 2007 Sanoma Digital bought the operation outright. Sanoma's own press release said the service carried more than 12,300 registered Finnish blogs, and that its previous owner considered it the leading Finnish blog directory.

Turkey had the same shape at the same time in Blogcu, and the reason both existed is that search alone was not enough. Google could find a post if you already knew what you were looking for. It could not tell you that eleven people in your country were writing well about the thing you cared about. A national directory could, because a person had put them in a category and other people had voted with their subscriptions.

That job was quietly taken away between 2010 and 2014. Readers stopped arriving from directories and started arriving from Facebook, and then from Instagram, and the Finnish blogging world reorganized itself around commercial blog portals with sales teams attached. A ranked public list of who was actually being read stopped being useful to the companies selling advertising against those blogs, which is a bad position for a ranked public list to be in.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a directory did ~

The thing worth remembering about Blogilista is that it was a discovery layer nobody owned the incentive to replace. Bloggers registered themselves. The ranking came from readers. There was no algorithm deciding what a Finnish reader ought to see next, only a sortable table and a lot of people maintaining their own entries.

When it went, Finnish bloggers spent the spring of 2015 writing posts asking each other where to register now. The answers were a scatter of smaller lists and commercial portals, none of which held the whole country. Several of those posts are still up, which is how a shutdown gets documented when the company doing the shutting says nothing.

~ the day it went ~

Sanoma announced in April 2015 that Blogilista would stop on 1 June. No reason was published. The Internet Archive shows the site serving a full eleven-kilobyte front page on 31 May 2015 and then, by the start of August, a page of about six hundred bytes.

That page was a blue background, white centered text, two lines of it. Blogilista.fi on lopettanut toimintansa. Kiitos kaikille käyttäjille kuluneista vuosista. Blogilista.fi has ceased operations, thank you to all users for the years gone by. Ten years of Finnish blogging held together by one index, closed out in raw HTML with no stylesheet and one hex color.

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