Doblog

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

~ the obituary ~

At about ten in the morning on 8 February 2009, a server hard disk failed at NTT Data and every blog hosted on Doblog stopped resolving. Not just the recent posts but everything, back to the first entries in 2003.

Doblog had opened as a trial on 4 November 2003 and become a full service on 5 October 2004, which puts it among the earliest blog hosts a Japanese person could sign up for. The unusual part was who ran it. NTT Data is a systems integrator, the enterprise contracting arm of the NTT group, and here it was operating a free consumer blog host for the stated purpose of learning how. The logo sat over a blue gradient with the line "It's hot to link information & people!" under it.

By 2009 I had been a computer engineer for a few years, and the part of this that stayed with me is not the disk. Disks fail. The part that matters is the recovery report: the specialists got back everything up to the early hours of 7 February, and past that point there was no backup data at all. A company whose entire business is running other people's systems had a consumer service with a hole in its backup chain.

Reading was mostly restored on 20 February. Posting was not restored for another two months, so a few thousand people spent that spring watching their own archive sit there readable and frozen.

~ the case file ~

~ what a systems integrator wanted with a blog host ~

The explanation published on 24 April was that the purpose Doblog had been opened for was now achieved. NTT Data had accumulated the technical knowledge for building blog systems and the operational know-how for running a community service, and so the service could end. Read three months after part of a user's archive had gone missing, that sentence did not land well.

Japanese bloggers said so at the time and at length, and the objection was mostly to the framing: five and a half years of other people's writing described as a completed research project. The active user count by then was somewhere between two and three thousand. One of the pioneers of the Japanese blog era finished smaller than a mid-sized forum.

The same announcement that set the closing date also switched posting back on, and the notice was explicit about why. Users needed to be able to tell their readers where they were moving to. Thirty-six days of write access, granted for the purpose of leaving.

~ the address ~

doblog.com no longer resolves. The Internet Archive's earliest capture of it is dated 6 November 2003, two days after the trial opened, and the 2006 front page still loads there with the logo and the tagline intact. That logo is what sits at the top of this page.

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