Kulmosnet (קולמוסנט)

» see kulmosnet.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kulmosnet was a web magazine, live from March 2003 to February 2020, put up by Rafi Gatniu, Yoram Hamizrachi and Shimon Mendes. The name is a compound of kulmos, a quill, and net. The purpose as stated was to give people writing in Hebrew a stage: somewhere to publish personal work, and somewhere to argue about it afterward in a forum. Articles on any subject at all were welcome.

The item on that list worth stopping at is the first one. Kulmosnet was built so that registered members could jointly write a sipur behemshechim, a story in installments, which is the Hebrew term for a serial. Not a shared world, not a fan continuation of something else, just a story that one person started and another person continued, and so on, on a site whose whole reason for existing was to make that possible. Collaborative fiction was everywhere on the early web, mostly on forums that tolerated it. Building a magazine around it as the headline feature was rarer.

Writing in the forum required registration, which sounds like a small gate and in practice was the design. Anybody could read. To add a line to somebody else's story you had to be a known name, which is how a site of that period kept a serial from being wrecked by whoever wandered in.

~ the case file ~

~ nobody got paid ~

The Hebrew Wikipedia description is unusually blunt about the economics, and it deserves quoting in full because it is the entire business model: those who write in it do so without monetary compensation, and the editing work is done voluntarily by a team of editors. That is both halves of a publication running on nothing. The usual arrangement is a submissions pool feeding a paid staff. Here it was volunteers filing to volunteers for seventeen years.

Two names recur as regular weekly columnists. Eli Eshed, a writer and researcher known in Israel for working the seams of popular culture, the pulp and the forgotten serials that respectable criticism skipped. And Yoram Hamizrachi, a journalist, who was also one of the three people who put the site up in the first place. A founder writing a weekly column into his own unpaid magazine for years is a fair summary of what kept the thing alive.

~ what the sources are ~

The March 2003 opening date and the February 2020 closing date come from Hebrew Wikipedia, and the archive backs both ends without quite dating the middle. There is an about page for kulmosnet.co.il captured on 17 January 2006 and a homepage capture from the following month. kulmosnet.co.il does not resolve at all now.

The stranger detail is what the article lists as the official site link. It is not kulmosnet.co.il. It is an Internet Archive capture, retrieved on 7 February 2020, of a forum index at blabla4u.com, an Israeli community host, which means that by the end Kulmosnet's forum was living on somebody else's platform under somebody else's domain. Whoever wrote that citation was recording the address on the day it stopped working. blabla4u.com now redirects to a landing page on an unrelated host.

~ why it is here ~

A magazine that paid nobody for seventeen years and then closed in a month nobody wrote about is close to the least dramatic death in this archive. There is no lawsuit and no acquisition, and nobody published an announcement. It is the ordinary way most of the writing internet ended: the volunteers who edited it got older and the serial stopped moving, and then one February the host bill went unpaid.

I have no way in to the Hebrew of it. What is legible from outside is the structure, and the structure was a good one. The entry requirement was registering a name and the payment was nothing, and what got built out of that was a story which only continued if the next person showed up.

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