Blogter

» see blogter.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The logo had a starburst in the corner of it, the kind a product puts on itself when it has won something. Az első hazai web 2.0 portál. The first Hungarian web 2.0 portal. Underneath the wordmark ran the tagline, a vélemény számít: opinion counts. In November 2008, on what an online marketing blog counted as its 1,096th day, the head of Blogter Kft. sat for an interview about where Hungarian blogging was going, and the premise of the piece was that blogs had become ordinary.

Blogter had launched three years before that, in November 2005, into a market where Hungary's blog hosts were competing hard enough that getting onto a front page was a thing worth doing. Its own pitch said so directly: start a blog at one of Hungary's leading blog providers, because here you can even make the front page. Thirty-one topic categories ran down the side, from Gasztronómia to Közlekedés, each with its own ranked list.

In 2010 the timeouts started. Support appeared to stop existing. From 2012 the site was unavailable more often than it was available, which users argued about publicly because some of them could still reach it. Nobody involved ever published a closing date, and the company behind it had been filing bad accounts for years.

~ the record ~

~ the last page ~

On 2 August 2014 the Internet Archive crawled blogter.hu eight times between 13:33 and 18:05 UTC. The last of those, 15,545 bytes, is the final copy of this site that exists anywhere. There is nothing after it. No tombstone, no holding page, not even a registrar parking a lapsed domain, which is unusual enough to be the death certificate on its own: when a site is replaced you see the replacement, and when a host is switched off the series just stops.

Read that last page and the illness is legible without any commentary. The top story is real and Hungarian, about something odd that happened at an election in Tiszavasvári. Everything under it is not. The popular list is carrying blogs called bestfitnesssale and best3dhdtv, posting English sentences like the thermostatic shower valve features and move in and out of tight spots. Search engine spam had taken the front page of a Hungarian blog host and nobody was left to sweep it off.

There is one more detail on that page. A line inviting readers to send in their comments and bug reports, credited to a user called gépész, timestamped több éve. Several years ago. The bug report address on the last day of the site's life was an old forum post nobody had touched since before the failures began.

~ dying without a date ~

ArchiveTeam filed it under August 2014 and added that the situation went critical that autumn, and that by December the domain was dropping out of Google's index. Both of those are observations of absence rather than of an event, which is the problem with this shape of death. There was no announcement to date, because announcing requires someone still being paid to write one.

The register's own phrasing for it is better than anything a summary could do: died after long illness. Four years of a service getting slower behind a company that had stopped being able to afford it.

~ the shape, elsewhere ~

Turkey had its own version of this running at exactly the same time, and Blogcu is already buried here. Same decade, same free-hosting model, and the same ending where the operator never said anything out loud as the audience left for social networks. What Hungary lost in August 2014 was nine years of diaries kept by people who had been promised a front page, and the only reason any of it is readable today is that a crawler happened to come by eight times on the right afternoon.

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