Il Cannocchiale

» see ilcannocchiale.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Il Cannocchiale opened on 18 February 2003 as the first Italian blogging platform built around news and politics rather than around diaries. That distinction mattered more then than it reads now. Italian blogging in the early 2000s was organized by platform, so opening a blog somewhere also meant joining that place, and Il Cannocchiale was where the arguing happened.

I do not read Italian, which puts a floor under how much of this I can claim. What survives in the archive is a homepage of headlines and blog excerpts in a language I have to run through a translator, and the thing I can actually verify from outside is the shape of the ending rather than what any of it said. Italy had its own full stack in those years and almost none of it crossed a border.

The platform was operated by DOL Srl, a small Milan company, and it was free. Free in the plainest sense, carried by a business that made its money elsewhere. That arrangement held for over a decade and it is the reason the ending looks the way it does.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the platform that ran on nothing ~

From 2015 the outages started, and then they stopped being events and became the weather. Users described suspensions that arrived almost daily. Blogs that had been running for ten years would go unreachable for hours and come back without explanation, and there was no support queue to escalate into because there was no support contract, because there had never been a bill.

~ the announcement that never came ~

In March 2018 one long-running Cannocchiale blogger published a public notice about the shutdown, the second such notice that person had written, and it is the closest thing to an official record that exists. The owner had said no final decision had been taken and that various options were being weighed, with a promise that any plan would be communicated well in advance through a proper announcement. The same post floated a subscription of about ten euros a month to cover maintenance and preserve the archive, and recommended that everyone move their posts elsewhere in the meantime.

The subscription was never introduced. The advance announcement was never published. What happened instead is that a company which had been paying for something out of goodwill for nineteen years eventually stopped paying, and nothing was attached to that decision because nothing had ever been attached to the previous one.

~ what the calendar shows ~

The Internet Archive captured ilcannocchiale.it monthly for most of its life. Those captures run at thirteen to fifteen kilobytes of real homepage right through 2020 and 2021, which is to say the platform kept serving pages the whole time it was falling apart. The last working capture is dated 6 March 2022 at 13,369 bytes. The next capture, on 22 June 2022, is a 302 redirect of 739 bytes. There is nothing in between.

Nineteen years of Italian political blogging is dated to a three-month window because nobody wrote a sentence about it at the time. Splinder, the other big Italian platform, at least got a closure notice and a deadline when it went in 2012. Il Cannocchiale got a gap in a crawl log.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »