Geekologie

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

~ the last words ~

geekologie.com answers today. What it serves is a black page with a few words of white text centered on it, saying the site has shut down and then telling you to go be happy. That page went up in the last week of April 2022 and has not been touched since.

The blog behind it started on 2 April 2006, with the first post two days later. For most of its run it published several items a day about gadgets and whatever internet oddity had surfaced that morning, each one a photo with a few lines under it. G4's Attack of the Show featured it in March 2008 and it took a Weblog Awards nomination the same year. In October 2012 Time put it on a list of the 25 best blogs of the year.

It belonged to Anticlown Media, a small network assembled by Karl Wang, who had written The Superficial before it. That network was never a company anybody outside the business could name, which was normal for the period. A blog with real traffic could sit under a holding entity of two or three sites and nobody reading it would ever have reason to find out.

~ the record ~

~ the house voice ~

Geekologie wrote in the second person and never once dropped it. Every post talked directly to you, with a running joke about the writer's own bad luck threaded through the captions, and the item underneath the photo was usually four sentences long. That register got copied across the whole late-2000s blog layer, and it dates the writing precisely, the way a font does.

For me the gap here is one of tier. Engadget and Gizmodo were the gadget names that traveled, and by 2008 I was reading them over TTNet broadband at university like everybody else with an interest. Geekologie sat a level under those, in the band of English-language blogs with an audience of regulars instead of an audience of everyone, and that band does not export. I knew the shape of the site without ever keeping it in a bookmark.

~ the eight months of silence ~

The last posts on the archived front page are dated 25 August 2021. After that the site went on serving, unchanged, through the rest of the year and into the next. The Internet Archive's final capture of the working site is 23 April 2022, and the goodbye page is already there on 28 April 2022, so the swap happened somewhere inside those five days.

The wording is the entire obituary, so it is worth having in full: "Geekologie has shut down. Thank you to everybody. Now go be happy." No reason given and no forwarding address. Anticlown Media had sold The Superficial off to Buzz Media back in 2009, and somebody has kept renewing geekologie.com for four years since to hold that one static page in place.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »