As of August 21, 2023, Skyblog no longer exists. Fans of kitschy gifs and shiny fonts should say goodbye to these hobbyist blogs, which had their heyday in the 2000s.
Faced with this sad announcement for web culture, the National Audiovisual Institute (Ina) and the French National Library (BnF) quickly acted as guarantors of the safeguarding of this French digital heritage, indicating that they would jointly archive all existing pages, that is, approximately 19 million blogs.
2 billion URLs to archive
And the work can finally begin. Because the National Library of France will only start its archiving process this week, after several test phases (the institution was contacted in April by Skyrock) to decree the most optimal way to collect this data.
“It will take around 50 days to archive the 12.6 million blogs that have been entrusted to us. Skyblog has already taken care of providing us with the URLs of the blog homepages, but we will have to find each component of the sites. We had to find the right speed of collection to avoid any problem,” explains Vladimir Tybin, head of the BnF’s Digital Legal Deposit department, to Tech&Co.
Ina, for her part, must archive a much more reasonable number of blogs, around a million. Contacted by Tech&Co, the institute has yet to respond to requests to know the progress of its collection process. But Ina already seems very advanced since he announced when he announced the closure of blogs that he had already saved no less than 1.6 million.
There is no free access to blogs.
For the BnF, the data collection will be done with Heritrix, a “collection robot” responsible for browsing the URLs that are sent to it to capture the source code of each page, with its texts, images or videos, and record everything.
A job that should not scare the robot, already accustomed to capturing the entire French web for several years, sometimes several times a day, from news sites to tweets (although the arrival of Elon Musk and the transition to X complicated the task). going through YouTube Channels or TikTok videos.
At the end of the 50 days of collection, with an expected end around November, the skyblogs will be available in the research rooms of the National Library of France, accessible mainly to researchers. “We cannot make all these sites available, for copyright and intellectual property reasons”, specifies Vladimir Tybin.
Therefore, it will be difficult for netizens who have not taken the necessary measures to save your relic to find it. Unless they justify a real investigative work, as much as it is possible in view of everything these skyblogs tell of a bygone era.
Source: BFM TV
