Conference Agenda

Created in 2002, the Skyblog platform was the pioneer of social networks in France and the cult blogging platform from the 2000s. The platform hosted up to 33.5 million blogs in 2011, 90% of them created by teenagers. Long before the emergence of social networks, it offered millions of users an open and free digital space where you could quickly create a blog and exchange messages with other members. You could personalize your page, choose the layout, colors (as flashy as possible!) and typography, and create your own world from scratch. The platform's motto was 'Ici T Libre' (literally, Here Ya Free). A space for editorial and aesthetic freedom that didn't exist anywhere else at that time. A refuge writing area, hosting virtual diaries, photo galleries, video clips, animated postcards and official blogs for clubs, classes, groups and enthusiasts of all kinds... Skyblog was one of the first spaces for expression and connection, and has left its mark on web culture and the history of the French web. Since the early 2010s, Skyblog was no longer so popular with its target audience, who gradually moved to Facebook, but some bloggers have remained loyal and continued to publish articles on their blogs, while others, nostalgic, decided to reopen their own.

The announcement of the platform's shutdown in the summer of 2023, which was widely covered by the media, caused a stir across a whole generation and instilled fear that all the content that was still online (more than 12.6 million blogs) would disappear for good. Informed in advance by Skyblog's managers, the National Library of France (BnF) and the National Institute for Audiovisual (INA) undertook an urgent and massive harvest of these blogs, as complete and accurate as possible, within the framework of web legal deposit. Harvesting the Skyblogs implied a technical complexity that web archivists rarely face: how to collect millions of sites made up of billions of articles, comments, pictures and avatars?

The shutdown of the platform also raised the interest of several research teams: "Skybox, Skyblogs à ciel ouvert" (literally Skybox, Skyblogs in open-air) and "Chronicles from the city" are the very first research projects to look into this gigantic archive: how to develop an epistemology of web archives using the Skyblogs? What methodologies should be used to build thematic research corpora?

The opening panel "Here Ya Free! Crossed views on Skyblog, the French pioneer of digital social networks" will bring together and cross the views of:

Pierre Bellanger, founder and CEO of Skyrock radio and founder of the Skyblog platform

Pauline Ferrari, freelance journalist, specialist in new technologies, and former skyblogger

Sara Aubry, web archiving technical lead, National Library of France (BnF)

Jérôme Thièvre, R&D and web archiving Manager, National Institute for Audiovisual (INA)

Emmanuelle Bermès, professor and researcher at Ecole nationale des chartes