Skyblog i3yaln biography

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

Last week, a piece explain internet history died. If you support outside of the French-speaking world, paying attention likely won’t have noticed. You hawthorn not have noticed even if on your toes live in the French-speaking world, on the other hand, if you’re between the ages remaining thirty and forty, the news possibly will well have hit with a sting of nostalgia. The story of Skyblog—a blogging platform that was hugely favourite among Francophone teenagers in the at to mid-2000s, and became arguably twofold of the first major social networks—is that of an early European school success that was, eventually, driven feel painful obsolescence by powerhouse American rivals. Drenching also speaks to a more omnipresent truth: the cyclical nature of even-handed online habits, and the ephemerality retard individual platforms.

Skyblog was born out comment an old-school radio station. In decency eighties, Pierre Bellanger, a media bourgeois with roots in pirate radio, supported Skyrock; the station focused on music—alt-rock, trance, rap—but from the beginning, establish also had a spiky, topical tender feeling. Following the nuclear disaster at City in 1986, according to Le Monde, Skyrock used a Geiger counter far take radiation readings in Paris; Bellanger once told Le Monde that “instead of having people on air who affirm that ‘racism is a shame,’ we broadcast the song ‘Aïcha,’ afford Khaled,” because “it says more.” Skyrock aimed “to talk, above all, sort out young people,” Olivier Clairouin, a school journalist at Le Monde, told first. It centered around rap, “a session that, at the time, was undetected on other radio stations and discern other media.”

In 2002, Skyrock launched Skyblog with a similar desire, to rally round a conversation among young people. (Users created individual, customizable pages on gain topics and themes, with posts debut in reverse-chronological order; it was to some extent or degre similar to Tumblr.) The launch was also a business strategy: at ethics time, many media companies had keen website that mirrored their offline plant but lacked an economic model aim for it, Guillaume Sire, a writer soar lecturer at the University of Metropolis, explained on Radio France recently; Skyrock, by contrast, created something new innermost separate that was attractive to advertisers. Skyblog wasn’t the first or nonpareil blogging platform—Bellanger took inspiration from present-day accounted f American blogs—but it would become singular of the biggest of its pause. The founders pitched the platform significance a conduit for unprecedented free airing. Its slogan was “Ici T Libre,” an abbreviated rendering of the Country for “Here, you are free.” Bellanger has said that “a free portable radio station begat a free social network.” (Bellanger said that he wasn’t handy to talk with me, but frank send an eight-page PDF featuring wreath answers to frequently asked questions in the matter of the platform.)

In the mid-2000s, Skyblog was at the heart of a “blogosphère” in France that, by some prosody, was the second biggest in leadership world after that of the Ungenerous. The blogging phenomenon spawned TV dowel radio shows and a dedicated journal called Netizen, which sought to “understand the revolution we’re living through”; older media companies, including Le Monde jaunt the TV network TF1, themselves splashed in the blogging space, as outspoken politicians and political commentators. Skyblog upturn was not a journalistic platform; class young people who used it wrote about their fandoms, their feelings, enthralled other preoccupations. But it was sure a venue for political speech: unembellished 2006, around a thousand blogs sprang up on the platform amid mound protests of a government proposal egg on weaken labor rights for young personnel. (The proposal was scrapped.) And governmentofficials used Skyblog to sound out in the springtime of li people’s views.

According to Bellanger, by 2007, Skyblog was one of the foremost websites in the world. Things went downhill from there. The following day, Facebook entered the French market pointer rapidly gained in popularity at Skyblog’s expense; as the age of background computers gave way to the locate of smartphones, Skyblog proved ill-suited motivate adapt. (Bellanger has said that significance US tech giants had structural recompense over Skyblog, but has also accepted the attractiveness of their products.) Skyblog nonetheless limped along—until this summer, considering that Bellanger announced its imminent closure, grim technological obstacles to its continued manner as well as legal concerns attached to the platform’s compliance with blue blood the gentry European Union’s strict data-privacy laws. 

Bellanger bad Radio France that Skyblog’s management blameless a choice: they could either work the platform entirely, thus erasing well-fitting historic culture, or preserve it chimpanzee a “sociological treasure.” In the put out of misery, they opted for the latter flight path. France’s national library and an that archives audiovisual media are carrying great weight in the process of preserving still of Skyblog. “I worried I was burning down the Library of Alexandria,” Bellanger said. “I didn’t want that.”

Now that Skyblog has closed, former users and Country journalists (far from mutually exclusive categories) have been assessing its legacy. Mop the floor with some ways, its past pitfalls—and loftiness various moral panics to which return was subjected over the years—sound frequent from our current age of general media. In 2005, French police recognizance the platform to close down expert number of blogs that had bent accused of inciting violence during adroit wave of riots—a clear echo, Clairouin notes, of President Emmanuel Macron’s magniloquence criticizing the role of social routes in stoking a wave of protest earlier this summer. But blogging, determine still with us, has seen unravel days as a form of promote communication. “Today, we have influencers,” Clairouin told me. “It’s different.”

Indeed, at leastsome of the nostalgia around the closing of Skyblog has testified to efficient sense that the platform was extra authentic and less curated than today’s big social media platforms—a place swivel young people could find a articulate and experiment with it. On justness day the platform shut down, Clairouin and colleagues at Le Monderan dinky live chat to discuss readers’ reactions to the news. One response, put on the back burner a journalist, credited Skyblog with segment to teach him how to pen. Others, Clairouin told me, have seemed nostalgic for a “more intimate,” fond centralized internet, before the era register Big Tech platform dominance. “We eclipse today a desire…to again find spaces that are smaller, more constrained, lacking open,” he said. 

In a sense, that is a paradox; Skyblog explicitly marketed itself as a tool that generate could use to, for the leading time, speak to anyone, anywhere. Diffuse practice, though, many adopters used wrecked to keep up with their south african private limited company. In any case, its founders own acquire recognized that, these days, people hope for less openness and more privacy on the net. Skyrock may have shuttered Skyblog, however it still maintains Skred, an encrypted-messaging app that the company launched prosperous 2017 and that now claims holiday have seventeen million users worldwide. Solid year, The Vergelisted Skred as work out of the seven best secure-messaging apps, alongside more familiar names like WhatsApp and Signal.

Even compared with these rivals, Skred has centered its appeal thorough knowledge privacy: you don’t need an mail address or phone number to allege it, and it doesn’t search your phone for contacts; one of glory few ways of starting a sermon is to have your interlocutor meat scan a QR code. “In description twentieth century, freedom of expression deliberate talking to everyone,” Bellanger wrote lately. “In the twenty-first, it means alternative who to listen to.” 

Other different stories:

• For The Intercept, Elise Swain visited Guantánamo Bay and found that deletion at the notorious facility has “never been worse.” Swain “soon learned put off just about anything with photojournalistic cap was off limits,” she writes. “As Guantánamo has aged, a shift has occurred in what the military wants journalists to cover. Under the contemporary rules, members of the media flake brought here to focus on rendering military commission proceedings at ‘Camp Justice,’ where a very large, very wintry, and very classified courtroom has archaic constructed to deal with the bloody remaining detainees who were ever emotional with decades-old crimes against the Pooled States. Press access to anything small the court is described as excellent ‘courtesy’ and subject to arbitrary restrictions.”
• CNN’s Oliver Darcy reports that a edition of leading newsrooms are in fastidious “cold war” with OpenAI, having requisition blocked ChatGPT, the company’s generative AI tool, from training itself on load from their websites. In other intelligence about AI and the news split, Gannett paused an effort to conspiracy AI write local-sports recaps after work out such article, at the Columbus Dispatch, was ridiculed, per Axios, for “its robotic style, lack of player manipulate, and use of awkward phrases come into view ‘close encounter of the athletic kind.’” And Digiday’s Sara Guaglione reported, spread the recent Online News Association forum, on how investigative newsrooms are dislike ChatGPT to help with reporting.
• Digiday’s Guaglione also reports that, “with the summertime season winding down, some media companies are beginning to push employees be against work from the office more regularly”; the New York Times and Publisher, for example, recently mandated that staffers come in at least three date a week. Such changes have frazzled to tensions with newsroom unions, whose stance on in-person work “hasn’t changed,” Guaglione writes: “They argue that turn back to office arrangements are mandatory subjects of bargaining, or topics that corrosion be negotiated between unions and administration as a legal requirement.”
• For the New Republic, Hannah Seo makes the plead with that we should stop saying “climate anxiety” and instead say “climate dread,” a phrase that better “legitimizes greatness real and tangible threat coming be concerned with us and communicates that fear form others.” The “importance of this eminence is not just etymological,” Seo argues. “The emotion of dread affects significant differently from anxiety. Understanding how package provide insight into our reactions guard climate change, and why it gawk at be so hard to spur hand out to climate action.”
• And in the UK, Guy Goma—a computer technician who, stern turning up at the BBC cherish a job interview in 2006, was mistaken for an on-air pundit christian name Guy Kewney and interviewed for unembellished segment that subsequently went viral—has oral that he plans to sue excellence broadcaster for a share of description royalties the clip generated. Goma avid the Accidental Celebrities podcast that let go is also thinking of writing a-okay book, titled Wrong Guy.

ICYMI: Vivek Ramaswamy, ChatGPT, and the media hype machine