Nana10

» see nana10.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nana was an ISP's side project. Netvision was selling Israelis their dial-up in 1999 and decided it also wanted the page they landed on, so it put Gadi Shamshon in as first editor and Zev Alon in as first chief executive, and ran the operation out of its own Haifa offices. The name was picked because it was short and because nobody would mistype nana.co.il.

The build was standard portal for the period. A news desk and culture sections, an internet magazine, forums running in Hebrew with parallel material in Arabic and Russian. NanaMail arrived in 2005. On 4 October 2006 Nana bought Israblog, which since August 2001 had been where a large slice of Israeli teenagers kept a diary, and that purchase is probably what kept the portal culturally alive years past the point where the format had died everywhere else.

This one is out of my reach in the most basic way: I do not read Hebrew. Nana's forums were the argument floor for a country of seven million people and every thread on it was in a script I cannot parse. I have looked at the archived front pages and I can tell you the layout was pure 2003 portal, three columns and a masthead, but I cannot tell you what any of it said.

The ownership history is where it gets interesting. In June 2007 Channel 10, a commercial television station, bought half the company for roughly 22.5 million dollars and the site became Nana10. Netvision sold the other half to JCS in October 2012 for about 10 million. In May 2014 Channel 10 bought JCS out and owned the whole thing.

~ the dossier ~

~ when television bought it ~

A portal owned by a broadcaster stops being a portal. The forums and the mail stayed on the server, but the editorial center of gravity moved to whatever the evening news had covered, and Nana10 turned into the website of Channel 10 with an old community bolted to the side of it.

Channel 10 was never a healthy business. It ran on debt and regulatory extensions for most of its existence and threatened to close down more than once. A station in that condition does not invest in maintaining a legacy blogging platform.

~ the redirect ~

On 11 December 2017 nana10.co.il stopped being itself. The station launched a clean news site at 10.tv and the old domain was set to forward there. Then in January 2019 Channel 10 merged into Reshet 13 and the redirect moved again, to 13news.co.il. An address that was online three years before Channel 10 ever went to air ended up as a forwarding rule for a channel that did not exist when it launched.

Try nana10.co.il from outside Israel today and you get a 403. The odd part of the ending is that the thing Nana bought outlived the thing that bought it. Israblog went dark for a while in late 2019 and came back on 27 May 2020 as a nonprofit with its archive intact, so the teenage diaries from 2004 are still readable while the portal that owned them is a redirect.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »