“It’s the end of an era”, “I feel old”, “With MSN and MySpace, it was the best network!”. On Twitter this summer, the testimonies of “millennials” about the blogs of their adolescence are raining. At the origin of this nostalgia, the end of another network which had its heyday in the 2000s: Skyblog. In a tweet published at the end of June, Jérôme Aguesse, the deputy managing director of Skyrock announced the going offline, this Monday, August 21, of this site dedicated – as its name suggests – to blogs.
And if this social network means nothing to you, you have to go back to the year 2002 precisely when its founder, Pierre Bellanger, launched Skyblog.com. “I was inspired by the discovery of American webblogs, which made it possible to do retro publishing, to click on links and above all to publish comments, at the time it was a revolution”, explains the latter to Figaro.
Attached to the Skyrock music radio, the site is intended to be a personalized web space to allow Internet users to create pages on music groups and discuss the subject. “I wanted to adapt this technology for putting personal diaries online and on a network,” he continues.
Thus, the Skyblog interface makes it possible to publish texts as well as photos but also to distribute links (to other blogs in particular) and to comment on the pages. The site quickly met with unexpected success. “When we had 500 blogs created on the platform, I thought it was a success,” recalls Pierre Bellanger.
At the peak of its use, however, they will be more than 27 million. “We found ourselves in the grip of an exponential phenomenon: overnight, we went from one blog created per hour to three per second”, explains its founder. “It is emblematic of a way of communicating of a generation at a given time, at the time of the emergence of digital technology”, reacts Vladimir Tybin, responsible for the legal deposit of the web for the National Library of France (BnF).
This ease of use appealed to the young French-speaking public of the 2000s. “In 2009, it was very fashionable, all my girlfriends had one!”, remembers Alice, 23 years old. Movies, stars, sports, manga, politics…on the site, there are as many blogs as there are centers of interest. “In college I had two skyblogs, one on the wrestler Shawn Michaels and another dedicated to PSG,” laughs Nassim, 27. “On mine, I was writing stories about characters from the Naruto manga,” adds Alice.
The announcement that the site was going offline also reminded Jade of the existence of her old skyblog, which had been forgotten for almost a decade. “Personally, I spent almost five years writing about groups that I loved like the 5 Seconds of Summer”, reacts the 24-year-old lawyer. And if Jade* keeps a good memory of it, other Internet users are relieved to see theirs disappear, “whose password they had lost for a century”.
However, there was a time, feeding “his Skyblog” was part of the daily pastimes of these teenagers. “I remember holidays spent on my grandfather’s computer where I wrote my fanfictions,” smiles Alice. “It had an exhilarating side to be read by other people, some girls even announced their new texts with the equivalent of newsletters today,” she notes.
Today, this business school student assures us that this social network has largely contributed to fueling her attraction to writing. “When I entered college, I took part in short story competitions, for example.” Nassim, who has become an adviser to the president of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE), makes the same observation. “It gave me a taste for debate and the animation of a community”, continues the young man. “Subsequently, I entered Sciences Po and I think that Skyblog contributed a little to it”.
The platform will end up being outdated in the 2010s with the arrival of behemoths in the sector such as the Facebook social network, made globally accessible in 2006. “Their emergence was the cause of the gradual decline of such textual production”, analyzes Vladimir Tybin, before clarifying: “We have moved to microblogging: much shorter texts and limited in terms of characters”.
So, to preserve this piece of French digital heritage that Skyblog represents, the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) and the National Library of France (BnF) jointly collect the content of the site. In total, there would remain nearly 12 million archived blogs on the platform. “What we would like is to keep as many of them as possible, in their diversity, even those which have only been consulted once, for example”, reports the person in charge of legal deposit of the web for the BnF.
To do this, the library uses “harvester robots”, which record the source codes, texts and images of the blogs in question. “The difficulty is that behind the 12 million blogs that we can archive, there may be several pages and this multiplies the URLs”, details Vladimir Tybin. For its part, the INA has chosen to sort out some of the content available on Skyblog. “In total, we have kept 1.6 million profiles and 200 million publications generated by these same accounts”, specifies Jérôme Thièvre, responsible for the legal deposit of the web for the Institute.
A work started in the 2010s and available for consultation in the reading rooms of the INA. “We are working to ensure that this consultation is interactive and the display of the site as faithful as possible to that of the 2000s”, he specifies. A carefully preserved recent digital history. Something to plug the wound of Internet users nostalgic for the good times of blogs and other forums.
*Name has been changed
