Olam.uz

» see olam.uz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Uzbek is a Turkic language, so from Turkey you can almost read it and then not quite. Olam.uz mostly did not offer the chance anyway: the portal that mattered in Tashkent published in Russian for a Russian-reading Uzbek audience, and it never crossed into anything I was looking at. What follows comes out of the Internet Archive's byte counts, because the ending was never written down anywhere else.

It launched on 1 March 2011, built by a company called Mobile Mass Media LLC with Aleksander Kamyshiev named as head of the portal. The model was Yandex rather than a news site: mail and a search box on day one, with a TV schedule and a jobs board filling in behind them, plus a separate social network at my.olam.uz that called itself free conversation and finding friends in Uzbekistan. Within about eleven months of launching it was reportedly the most-visited address in the whole .uz zone.

IREX's survey of Uzbek media for 2013 put Olam.uz first among the country's most-visited news websites, while adding that every one of them was heavily self-censored. It also credited the site with something called Interactive Power, started in February 2012, where readers chose which government institution would be put questions. For Uzbekistan under Islam Karimov that was close to the edge of what was available.

~ the case file ~

~ the january notice ~

The last normal day was 18 January 2013. On the 19th the portal replaced itself with two sentences in Russian saying that technical work was underway on the site and apologizing for the temporary inconvenience. The operator stuck to that story: a Mobile Mass Media representative told RFE/RL's Ozodlik service that the outage was entirely technical and temporary, and that the authorities had raised no objections so far.

The reporting said otherwise. A criminal case had been opened in late November 2012 against the head of the owning company and the site's editor, and in December the Yakkasaray district prosecutor's office had taken every piece of equipment out of the firm's Tashkent office. The nominal charge was copyright, for running state news agency material without attribution. The seizure paperwork, as described by Uznews.net and repeated by Lenta.ru, also listed treason and espionage, which is a considerable distance from an unattributed wire story. No verdict or official statement was ever published, and the BBC's Tashkent sources could not confirm the espionage claims. What people in the city suspected was simpler: the comment threads under Olam.uz stories were unusually free.

~ the license changed hands ~

It came back in early August 2013 after roughly six and a half months dark, with a new design and promises of video and music sections. The comment fields were there and reader comments were not. One detail went unreported by everyone who covered the relaunch, and it is sitting in the page footer: before January the site was copyright Mobile Mass Media LLC under UzAPI internet-media license number 0653, and from August it was Rubicon Radio Systems LLC under license number 0983. The brand returned. The company behind it did not. The social network and the blogs never came back at all.

~ eleven thousand bytes to eight hundred ~

The Archive's record of the second ending is unusually exact for something nobody wrote about. On 3 November 2013 the news subdomain was crawled serving 11,357 bytes, with the hybrid solar eclipse of that same day at the top of the column. There is no capture of any kind after that until 1 January 2014, when the front page answers in 828 bytes. The body is the identical technical-work notice from the previous January, put back up and then left alone. It sits there at around 800 bytes through 2014 and shrinks a little across the two years after that, before turning into a bare redirect by 2018.

Searches in Russian and Uzbek turn up no coverage of the second closing at all. The January suspension made the BBC and Ozodlik and was picked up from there; the actual death made nothing, because by then it was a site that had already died once and come back wearing someone else's license. The domain is still registered, paid up until June 2028, with its nameservers set to nothing at all.

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