Skynetblogs

» see skynetblogs.be as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On Friday 29 June 2018 the Skynet blog platform closed, as the page that had already replaced its blogs said it would: "La plateforme des blogs Skynet fermera définitivement ses portes ce vendredi 29 juin." The same paragraph followed in Dutch, and a few lines of script showed each visitor whichever of the two their browser asked for. Skynetblogs had been the free blog host of Skynet, the internet brand of the Belgian national telecom Belgacom, by then renamed Proximus.

The oldest blog in the Wayback Machine is a tester's. On 1 June 2003 someone called namreh wrote, in Dutch, that this was a first test of the weblog service and that creating a weblog had taken about six minutes. Ten minutes later he posted his first bug. Before the hour was out he had found that posts accepted raw JavaScript, which he pointed out could be used for stealing cookies. The page footer reads "Skynet 2003". A Belgacom spokesman later gave June 2004 as the start of the public offer.

By the afternoon of Friday 31 August 2007 the platform held 142,937 blogs, a number the Belgacom group's spokesman Haroun Fenaux gave to La Dernière Heure. Each blog lived at its own skynetblogs.be subdomain. The portal at blogs.skynet.be promised a free blog in five minutes and kept a selection of its favorites under the name Club VIB.

~ the record ~

~ blog illicite? ~

Every Skynet blog carried a link in its header that asked "Blog illicite?", and anyone could use it to report the page they were reading. Fenaux described the procedure in 2007. A complaint was checked first, then the blog was hidden from the public and its owner had 24 hours to fix the post. If nothing changed the blog was removed for good. About twenty complaints came in each month, and he said 99 percent of them ended with an apology between the two sides. He admitted that the early days had brought quite a few problems.

Skynetblogs was Belgian all the way down, a bilingual portal in French and Dutch run by the national telecom, and nobody outside the country had a reason to open an account. Turkey had its own national blog host in Blogcu, which went offline on 1 July 2020 with no notice of any kind. Skynet's bloggers got at least eleven weeks and an export guide.

~ a friday in june ~

The notice reached bloggers by the second week of April 2018. It said Skynet would soon end a service that some of them had used "depuis de très nombreuses années", and that their blogs would stop being visible from "vendredi 31 mai 2018", a date that fell on a Thursday. A month earlier a Proximus forum expert had told a user who could not log in that the company no longer ran the blogs itself and that everything went through an outside firm. The reason given to the press was that the product was obsolete. Proximus published a step-by-step guide for moving a blog to WordPress.

The take-down was gradual, in the notice's own words "une mise hors ligne progressive". The archive shows the farewell page standing in for blogs from 2 June, and after 29 June an unexported blog could not be recovered. A blogger who photographed the spiders of Waterloo counted 2,656 posts over about twelve years before moving out. A classical music blogger who had been there since January 2008 saved every post and then watched his search traffic fall away, because the old skynetblogs.be addresses had ranked well and the new one had no history. The Skynet portal itself followed on 1 July 2019.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »