The Digital Village

» see tdv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Digital Village described itself, in its own words on its own company page, as a digital media and communications company founded in 1994 to take advantage of the convergence of digital media. That sentence covers a great deal of ground. What it meant in practice was that Douglas Adams had become interested in computers roughly a decade before most of the publishing world did, and that a group of television and literary people in London agreed to find out with him what that was worth.

Seven people are described as founders on the company's own site, and the list is strange enough to be worth reading. Adams was listed as Chief Fantasist. Robbie Stamp, an ex-Central Television executive producer, was chief executive. Richard Creasey came from fourteen years running factual programming at ATV and Central. Ed Victor was a literary agent. Ian Charles Stewart, who handled the money side, had been one of the founding partners of Wired. Mary Glanville had set up Virgin's television sales division in 1986, and Richard Harris had been managing director of a company called The Internet People. By its own account the business employed over forty people and had already moved offices twice.

The output was thin for six and a half years of work, and the two things it is remembered for could not have been less alike. Starship Titanic, a PC CD-ROM adventure built around a spaceship that had suffered Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure, came out in North America on 2 April 1998 through Simon & Schuster Interactive. Publishers expected 200,000 copies and just over 60,000 had sold by the time April ran out. Then on 28 April 1999, live on BBC1's Tomorrow's World at half past seven in the evening, Adams launched h2g2, a guide to life written by whoever turned up to write it. Within twenty-four hours three thousand people had registered as researchers and twelve hundred pages existed that had not existed the day before.

I was seventeen when this company stopped. The Hitchhiker's books had reached Turkey in translation years earlier and were easy enough to find, but h2g2 was an English-language project run out of London for people who would write English essays for fun at dial-up speeds, and that is a much narrower door than it looks from here.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the launch night ~

TDV's own press release from 30 April 1999 is still online and still counting. Thirty thousand page hits within minutes of the Tomorrow's World segment. Fifty thousand articles read in the first day, fifteen hundred messages posted. By September the beta was doing a million and a half page views a month with visitors from more than eighty-five countries, and the company was talking about an e-commerce wing at tradingpost.h2g2.com in time for Christmas.

The idea was older than Wikipedia and arrived from a completely different direction. Wikipedia came out of free-software culture and wanted an encyclopedia. h2g2 came out of a joke in a novel and wanted a guide, written in the first person, about anything at all, with the entries edited by volunteers who were given the title of Sub-Editor because titles were funny. The joke was load-bearing. People wrote for it because it was the actual Hitchhiker's Guide and they were in it.

~ what the bbc took ~

Money ran short at the end of 2000, at exactly the moment every other British internet company's money ran short. The published account of what happened next is thin and mostly uncited, and the thinness tells you something on its own: staff kept working unpaid, and in January 2001 the BBC took over the running of h2g2 and moved it to bbc.co.uk. An academic review of the site published that June notes that a Yahoo! chat group started on 25 January 2001 and was drawing a thousand contributions a week while the site itself sat inactive. By mid-March the BBC had bought the content and the software rights and relaunched it.

Douglas Adams died in Santa Barbara on 11 May 2001. The order of events matters and gets inverted constantly in the retellings: the company had already lost its only valuable asset four months before he died. His two surviving directorships at Companies House both record a resignation date of 11 May 2001, and neither of those companies is TDV, because TDV is not on the register at all. Dissolved British companies are purged after about twenty years. No filing survives and no Gazette notice exists, so there is no recorded date on which The Digital Village legally ceased to be a company.

~ what the site still says ~

tdv.com resolves. It serves 2,688 bytes of period HTML, with Dreamweaver image rollovers still wired into a navigation lozenge that reads "the digital village" in lowercase. Every page carries a copyright line of 1998. The headline list on the front page runs backwards from a single entry dated 11.May.2001 and headed "So long, and thanks for all the fish ...". The entry below it is dated 1.Feb.2001 and headed "All your base are belong to us". Both of those headline pages now 404. The newest story whose body survives is from 30 March 2000 and is about an acoustic album by the guitarist Robbie McIntosh that the company released, with sleeve notes written by Adams and signed from Santa Barbara.

The links still work outward too. The splash image is 250 pixels wide at 300 dots per inch, two red spheres beside two blue slashes making a colon and two forward slashes, with THE DIGITAL VILLAGE letterspaced underneath. Click the h2g2 logo and it goes to bbc.co.uk/h2g2, which redirects to a BBC maintenance page explaining that h2g2 has left the BBC and can be found at h2g2.com. h2g2.com was sold to a community company called Not Panicking Ltd in 2011 and today returns a 503 reading DON'T PANIC.

Somebody has paid the registrar for tdv.com every year for twenty-five years, and the hosting bill is evidently being met by someone too, while nobody at all has touched the files. A company that spent its whole life arguing the web would be the place where things lived forever turned out to be right about itself and almost nothing else.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »