Konceptzia

» see exego.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Every language that got a web in the late nineties needed somebody to explain it in that language: what a grid was, and why the thing you built looked different in the other browser. Hebrew got Konceptzia, which opened in 1999 at exego.net and spent a decade as the place Israeli designers and front-end people argued with each other about all of it.

Yarden Levinsky and Ilan Galini started it with Uri Brukin, and the shape it settled into was less a magazine than a workshop that occasionally published. Reshimot began as a system for running a personal site, became a blogging platform, and ended up with something close to a guest list, carrying novelists and people from the universities. For anyone actually building a site there was HaKlalim, which went through web standards in plain Hebrew, plus a weekly technology letter called HaKolektiv that arrived by email. Then there was Optimum, a hand-picked directory of sites worth looking at, which in practice meant somebody had drawn a map of the Israeli internet and kept redrawing it.

The recognition was real and it came from outside the scene. Ynet called it an influential force in Israeli new media in 2002. In 2003 the people behind it turned up on a Yedioth Ahronoth list of a hundred cultural figures in the country, which is not where you normally find a group of web designers. The Israeli Internet Association worked with it through 2004 and 2005 and gave it certificates and a volunteering badge.

It also never had any money. A budget crisis closed it temporarily in 2006. Operations stopped properly in 2009, although some of the spun-off projects kept running as late as 2012. Toward the end of 2009 the Reshimot writers started moving their archives onto WordPress and Blogspot, which is the point where a platform is finished whatever its status page says. Reshimot itself went offline in April 2020.

~ the case file ~

~ the directory as a map ~

Optimum is the part that dates it hardest and the part worth defending. In 1999 a small national web could genuinely be mapped by hand: a few thousand sites that mattered, sorted by a person with taste who knew which ones were any good. Yahoo's directory tried the same at global scale and drowned. At the scale of one country and one language it worked, and for a while an Optimum listing was how a new Israeli site got found at all.

That job went to search first and then to feeds. By 2009 nobody was maintaining a directory of the Israeli web by hand, and nobody has since.

~ the same thing happened here, in forums ~

Turkey had this too, just not as a magazine. The equivalent conversation about standards and hosting and what your markup should look like lived on donanimhaber and frmtr, in threads, under signatures listing everybody's hardware. It was the same knowledge moving between the same kind of people, distributed across a forum instead of edited into issues, and the forum format meant nobody ever got put on a list of cultural figures for it.

I came to Konceptzia the way anyone outside Hebrew does, which is late and through a category listing of dead Israeli websites. The interesting discovery was not the magazine. It was the fact that the same job was being done at the same time in a language I cannot read, by roughly the same number of people, with roughly the same conclusions about browsers.

~ the archive is still standing ~

exego.net answers today. Not a parking page and not a squat on a lapsed domain: it serves the archive, the old Collective letters and the sections, sitting on the address it always had. That puts it with the small set of dead sites whose owners left the lights on deliberately.

Ten years of a national web's professional argument, preserved by whoever kept paying the registrar. Most of this era is gone because nobody made that decision.

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