goo blog

» see blog.goo.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In September 2025 a Japanese engineer moved off goo blog and wrote up the migration afterward, the way engineers do. The number in the post is 9,911. That is how many articles they carried out of a blog that had been running there since the late 2000s, moved across in a batch job because the host was closing and there was a deadline on the import tool at the other end.

Multiply that by however many people were still posting after twenty-one years and you have the shape of the thing that ended on 18 November 2025. goo blog launched in March 2004, in the middle of the window when free blog hosting was the default way an ordinary person got words onto the web, and in Japan that window was crowded. It survived long past the era that produced it, which is why the shutdown mattered more than a 2004 launch date suggests. People do not maintain a blog for twenty-one years unless it has become a habit, and habits are what shutdown notices actually kill.

The announcement landed on 14 April 2025 from NTT Docomo, which had absorbed NTT Resonant and inherited the portal along with it. The stated reason was a concentration of management resources following changes in market trends and in service usage. Read the second half of that: usage had fallen. The first half is what a company says when it has decided the fall is permanent.

~ the case file ~

~ the exit ramp ~

Compared to its sibling on the same portal, goo blog handled the ending well. The data migration and download function opened on 16 April, two days after the announcement, and the staff blog pointed people at named destinations rather than shrugging. Ameba Blog for the ones who wanted another free host, Hatena Blog for the ones who wanted something closer to a writer's tool.

There was one operational catch and it was published clearly. Hatena imports had to be started by the end of October to finish in time, because moving text is fast and moving images is not. New blog creation stopped on 1 July. New posts stopped on 1 October. The service itself ended seven weeks after that.

~ the race ~

Archive Team opened an ArchiveBot job on 14 April 2025 and then ran a distributed grab against the whole host until the deadline, coordinated through a project tracker and a channel on hackint. What they pulled is in the Internet Archive as archiveteam_gooblog and it is marked partially saved, which is an honest label for seven months of volunteers against twenty-one years of a national blog host.

The individual blogger with the 9,911 posts and the volunteers with the grab were doing the same job from opposite ends. One of them was saving a specific person's writing and the other was saving whatever it could reach. Between them, some fraction of 18 November 2025 still exists.

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