Skyblog will go offline on August 21, but its content doesn’t die with the site. The National Audiovisual Institute (Ina) has announced that it already has a copy of more than 1.6 million skyblogs.
This backup copy does not constitute all the existing pages but, in the long term, “the National Library of France is in charge of safeguarding the whole,” says Jérôme Aguesse, deputy general manager of Skyrock, contacted by Tech&Co.
In a count published on its platform, Skyrock indicates that it has more than 19 million blogs and 13 million profiles. (For comparison, in 2009, the year that marked the end of its golden age, the site had more than 28 million accessible blogs and nearly 19 million profiles.)
“Sociological Treasure”
Internet users protested the end of this monument to the Internet, launched in 2002 by Skyrock radio, where teenagers poured their taste into montages, summaries of their lives and enthusiastic comments.
Relegated to the depths of the web since the late 2000s, the platform was still used by a rare few followers. Some were even trying to start a movement to reverse the decision. “We have 2 months to show that the faithful of the site are still there,” even launches a page contrary to the closure.
In order to comply with personal data legislation and keep the platform and skyblogs in their current form, Skyblog had specified in a post published on June 16 that it had to “freeze and remove it from public access.”
If it is possible to save your own page, or those of others, before D-Day, there was already a general backup in the program. “This sociological treasure will be anonymized and will go to the national archives so that tomorrow scholars and researchers can realize with a previously unimaginable granularity what the new generation of the early 21st century was like,” Skyblog had assured.
Now it is (partially) done. The preserved blogs will become part of the legal deposit of the web, entrusted to the INA and the BnF. Since 2006, this collection of French audiovisual archives has been supplemented by those of more than 16,000 media websites, or 104 billion URL versions.
These collections are not accessible online, but can be consulted through search spaces. And the old skyblogs of him will now be part of it.
Source: BFM TV
