ArsDigita post mortems

Tuesday 24 June 2003 — This is over 21 years old. Be careful.

Two survivors of ArsDigita have written up their versions of events. First Eve Andersson gave us her view: Diary of a Start-Up (summary: VCs suck). Then Michael Yoon responded with ArsDigita: An Alternate Perspective (summary: it was more complicated than that). Both are interesting recaps of what must have been tumultuous times.

I worked at a failed startup that never got beyond 30 employees, and I know there was plenty of room even there for multiple perceptions of truth. I can only imagine how complex a place like ArsDigita got by the end of its run.

By all accounts, ArsDigita was an idealistic place, staffed with intelligent people. Its founder Philip Greenspun (blog) is both idealistic and intelligent, with quirky and charismatic thrown into the bargain.

BTW: What ever happened to ArsDigita? It was bought by Red Hat.

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Comments

[gravatar]
andrew 3:46 PM on 26 Jun 2003
Did you notice that BR's site is no longer being cached by Wayback? It is being blocked by robots.txt. Do the dunces over at NCG own the domain name and have they now decided that it is the only profitable asset left?
[gravatar]
Bob 12:37 PM on 30 Jun 2003
Actually, it looks like NCG doesn't own BR any longer. The domain registry indicates that its owned by "DOTSTER" or something like that. Just being held in case some other bozos want the domain. The robots.txt excludes Google and the Internet Archive since that would likely be the only traffic it would get:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: Scooter
Disallow: /

--bob

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