UOL Blogs

» see blog.uol.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

UOL is the portal Brazil built its web on. Universo Online started in 1996 out of Grupo Folha, became the country's largest internet provider and its largest content site at the same time, and for most of two decades a Brazilian paying for dial-up or broadband was usually paying UOL. Somewhere in that bundle, by 2004 at the latest, was a blog. You got space at blog.uol.com.br, a template, and a listing in a directory the portal called the Blogosfera.

The platform had the shape of its era exactly. Blogs were sorted by author and by theme, with a search box that searched nothing but blogs. The homepage promoted a rotating set of named writers alongside whatever anonymous person had posted that morning. Subscribers got more than visitors did, which is how a portal monetized a free-feeling product in 2004. The archived copies show the design barely moving between 2004 and 2015.

The ending started in late April 2018. Between the morning of the 24th and the evening of the 25th, a notice appeared on the homepage announcing that creating new blogs was disabled and the whole thing would be switched off on 1 July 2018. That was the first of five dates.

In early June the notice changed to say 1 November instead, which bought the platform another four months. Late October brought it forward again to 1 December, November moved it to 15 December, and then in mid-December it was rewritten one last time to 31 January 2019, which is the date that actually happened. The final version of the notice, still sitting on a capture from 2 January 2019, reads: A CRIAÇÃO DE NOVOS BLOGS ESTÁ DESATIVADA. O UOL BLOG SERÁ DESLIGADO NO DIA 31/01/2019.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the five dates ~

Nobody covered any of this. There is no press release for the first announcement and no correction for the four that followed, so the only record of the chain is the homepage itself, captured by the Internet Archive often enough that each revision of the notice is bracketed to within a day or two. Archive Team's page for UOL Blogs is built entirely out of those brackets.

Eight extra months is a lot of mercy for a platform nobody was going to miss publicly, and it suggests the deletion was harder than planned. Fifteen years of blogs is a volume where someone keeps finding one more thing that breaks.

~ what a portal blog was ~

This model is gone everywhere now. A portal blog was a feature of your internet subscription, like a webmail address or a few megabytes of homepage space, and it came with whatever audience the portal decided to point at it. You did not choose a platform. You already had one, because you had chosen an ISP.

Turkey had the same arrangement under different names, so the shape is familiar to me even though the language on these pages is not. What I cannot claim is the content. Fifteen years of Brazilian writing went down on 31 January 2019 and I never read a line of it, which makes this an obituary assembled from an archived homepage and a shutdown notice in a language I had to translate.

~ the same winter as the forum ~

UOL was closing more than the blogs. The UOL Jogos forum, one of the oldest gaming communities in Brazil and the home of a famously unmoderated section, was announced for complete deactivation by January 2019 on roughly the same timetable. Two decades of Brazilian conversation came off the portal in a single season, and the blog half went without a single news story.

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