Radilog (らじろぐ)

» see radilog.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The pitch was that your blog became a radio station. Radilog opened on 28 September 2005 with that line on the front page, and the pitch rested on two conditions that happened to hold in Japan. Free blog hosting was already a mass product there, and the engine underneath could be rented rather than written: the company took Seesaa's hosted BlogServer and bolted its own features onto it.

The company was Comz Network, a small outfit in Adachi ward in the north of Tokyo, run by Shinji Shimizu. It reorganized into SEAMS around May 2006, which is why the Japanese encyclopedia entry credits the wrong company with the launch. The service stayed free for its entire life and ran on advertising. Each account got a gigabyte of space for media and no limit at all on text.

What it actually sold you was the idea that the microphone was not a production problem. Everything went through a Flash applet in the browser, with no plugin to install and no streaming chain to configure. The company's own phrasing was that one mic was enough. You could broadcast live, and the service would email anyone following you to say you had gone on air, or upload a recorded MP3 and let it go out as a podcast feed. From July 2006 the listening end got a turn: readers could leave ten seconds of spoken comment on a post, three per article at most, deleted automatically after a week.

The option that gives the product away is the one in the settings. You could hide the radio half entirely and run the thing as an ordinary blog. It was sold as a radio service and built as a blog service, and the audio was a switch.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the music problem ~

Anyone who has ever tried to run an amateur radio show hits the same wall, and Radilog hit it early. Its DJs were hunting for royalty-free tracks on their own, badly, and the alternative was broadcasting music they had no right to.

The answer shipped on 12 April 2007 and the company called it a first for Japan: a cleared music library inside the broadcasting tool, roughly three hundred tracks at launch with a thousand targeted inside the year, plus a sound streamer that played them. The restrictions tell you what the deal with the rights holders must have been. The tracks streamed only, so nobody could pull a file down, and they were explicitly unusable in podcasts, because a podcast is a download by definition. The license covered the live hour and stopped at the recording.

~ the addendum ~

They posted the closure notice on 7 July 2010, a day after the company had posted a report about a server failure that was making the site intermittently unreachable. It said the site would close on 31 August, that every registered personal detail would go with it along with every uploaded post and every file behind one, and that users should move their own material off in the meantime. For a reason it offered the standard Japanese formula for declining to give one.

The next day, 8 July, they added a note under it headed with the reason for the closure. Running stable audio streaming and blogging, it said, took real money for equipment and for the staff to support it. Radilog had been completely free since the day it opened. The recent recession had made it hard to keep funding the servers and the support, and as a result they had been getting a lot of complaints about exactly those two things. Their aim had been to get people talking to each other, and what they had ended up doing instead was causing their users stress. Continuing to offer a free service had become impossible for the company.

That is more candor than a shutdown notice usually contains, and it was signed by the operations desk rather than an executive. It was also the last thing ever posted to that feed.

~ how it signed off ~

The announcement was never touched again. Crawls of the notice on 10 July and again on 24 August come back byte for byte identical, so the date was never postponed and never taken back. The last time anyone archived a working page was 21 June 2010. The next archived state, on 3 October, is the server's own Apache banner returning a forbidden response on the document root. There was no redirect and no farewell page, just the host refusing to serve the directory.

The wordmark survives and it argues the case better than the press releases did. Four colored tiles spell the name in hiragana, and above them, in English, is the equation the product was built on: radio plus blog equals Radilog. The blog is the second term and the sum is a blog with a transmitter attached, which is the order the company used in its own launch copy too.

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