BluWiki

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

~ the obit ~

BluWiki opened in 2004 as free MediaWiki hosting with a pitch printed on its own front page: websites for the people, without censoring, popups or banner ads, and you would not even have to know HTML. Sam Odio ran it through a company called OdioWorks. Anyone could sign up and get a wiki. The money came from a donation link that sat near the top of the main page for fifteen years, under a heading that read "Keep this site free!" and a bullet that asked you to feed a struggling entrepreneur.

The thing it is remembered for happened in November 2008, when Apple's attorneys sent OdioWorks a series of legal threats about a handful of pages where hobbyists were working out how iPods and iPhones store their music databases, so that software other than iTunes could talk to them. Apple called it a circumvention of its protection measures under the DMCA. Odio took the pages down and started looking for help. In April 2009 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the San Francisco firm Keker and Van Nest filed suit on his behalf, asking a court to declare the pages lawful.

Apple folded on 8 July 2009. Its letter said the company "no longer has, nor will it have in the future, any objection to the publication of the iTunesDB Pages," the EFF moved to dismiss its own complaint, and the pages went back up. The case is still cited as one of the cleaner examples of a DMCA threat collapsing the moment somebody with lawyers pushed back. BluWiki then went back to being what it had always been, which was a small free host nobody wrote about.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ november 2008 ~

What is easy to miss about OdioWorks v. Apple is the size difference. On one side a public company. On the other a hosting service whose own homepage was asking for a few dollars to keep the ads off. The pages in dispute held notes by people reverse-engineering a hash so that Linux users could sync their own iPods, which is the sort of work that has been happening in public since the first proprietary file format shipped.

Apple never had to explain itself in court. It sent the threat, got the takedown it wanted for eight months, and then withdrew when the alternative was a judge looking at the claim. That is the shape of the thing worth remembering, more than the outcome.

~ what a free wiki host actually was ~

For most of the 2000s there were dozens of these. You wanted a wiki for a band, a tabletop campaign, a course, a translation project, and you did not want to run a LAMP box, so you went to one of the farms. BluWiki, ScribbleWiki, Wikia, PBwiki, a long tail of smaller ones. Most died quietly because MediaWiki is heavy, spam is relentless, and a donation link does not scale with a hosting bill.

This part of the web never really arrived where I was. Turkish projects of that era lived on forums instead, on donanimhaber and frmtr and the hundreds of phpBB boards behind them, where the moderators were the structure and nobody needed a page history. I was reading English wikis constantly by then, but it did not occur to me to go and start one, and I do not think it occurred to many people around me either.

~ the last four days ~

There is no closing post. The main page was still being served on 20 September 2019, still asking for donations, still carrying news items about a MediaWiki upgrade and a new Facebook page, which is to say somebody was still maintaining it. Between 24 and 27 September the Internet Archive's crawlers went through the site article by article, the fingerprint of a rescue grab rather than a routine sweep, and the WikiTeam project ended up with about twenty database dumps. The Ipodhash page was captured on 26 September, fifteen years after the site opened and ten after Apple backed off it.

After that, nothing. The next visit on record is in February 2021 and it is a redirect to somewhere else. A domain that had served a million page views a month on donations simply stopped, and whoever had been paying for it did not leave a note.

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