Nikki Saito (日記才人)

~ the goodbye ~

This one ran from june 1996 to july 2007, which covers my early internet almost exactly. I was on a 33.6k modem for most of the front half of it. The distance here is not time, it is script. A directory of Japanese-language web diaries was not usable by a Turkish teenager even if he stumbled onto it, and stumbling onto it would have meant knowing it was there.

It opened on 1 june 1996 as 日記猿人, read nikki enjin. The characters mean something close to diary monkey person, but the reading is a pun on the word engine, which is what the thing was. A person going by Bauwau ran it. On 1 january 2001 the name changed to 日記才人, nikki saito, which reads as a pun on the word site. Eleven years, two names, one joke about which part of the web it stood in for.

The mechanism was a link directory sorted into categories by subject and by the writer's occupation, with a voting button attached. Readers voted for diaries they liked and the votes produced a ranking. In 1996 that was the entire discovery layer, because search engines could not surface a personal diary and there was no social graph to carry one.

Growth was steady and the numbers are easy to misread as small. Over a thousand registered diaries by december 1997. Over ten thousand by december 2000. Around seventeen thousand cumulative registrations by february 2002, every one of them a hand-built page on somebody's own hosting, updated by hand.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the mechanism ~

The voting sounds trivial now and it was the whole design. A Japanese writer describing the site later compared it to finding a song through a hit chart: you did not know the writer, so you trusted the position instead. It made reading a participatory act rather than a private one, and it gave the Japanese personal web the closest thing it ever had to a shared front page.

~ the decline ~

The failure mode was the one every ranking eventually reaches. The top of the chart froze. Long-running sites with established readerships held their positions, newcomers could not break in, and the list stopped working as a discovery tool and became a hall of fame. That was the diagnosis Japanese bloggers were writing at the time of the closure, and it landed in the same years that hosted blog services turned a personal site into something you no longer had to build yourself.

~ the funny part ~

When the shutdown was announced in june 2007, the phrase that went around in Japanese was the end of the age of exploration for personal sites. That is a heavy thing to say about a link list closing, and it was accurate. The directory-plus-vote pattern Nikki Enjin was running in 1996 is what every feed does now, except that the votes have gone implicit and the ranking is not yours to see.

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