Sorry to hear some sad news today. Just by coincidence, checking out an Austrian blog Heinz Wittenbrink pointed me to, I found out that Robert Basic died Friday last week of heart failure. Robert Basic is of my age, and was one of the most visible bloggers in Germany in the ’00s, writing a tech blog, basicthinking.de. I never actually met him in person, but our blog networks and therefore blog conversations strongly overlapped. One of those bloggers in the middle distance for me, I’d always encounter him in the comments of other bloggers I read, and we read each others blog, but never directly engaging much otherwise. Not someone close, nor a stranger, but a familiar face in the neighbourhood to chat with, mutually acknowledging you’re part of the fabric of that neighbourhood.

I distinctly remember two moments from Robert’s blogging. The first one was when ‘we’, as in a bunch of other bloggers in his network, found out that Robert automated the actual moment of publishing a posting. To better spread out his writing over a week, so he could write a number of things, but not post them all at the same time. The ‘smoking gun’ was some other bloggers being in a meeting with him talking, and seeing how posts would go up on his site at that moment. We discussed it as inauthentic behaviour. A true blogger would write in the moment and immediately post. Since then being able to preset the precise moment of a blogpost has become standard functionality, and I use it regularly.

The second moment was when, after six years of blogging, he no longer wanted to continue his very successful blog and started again on a new blog. He put basicthinking.de up for sale on eBay in 2009. It brought in 46.902 Euro. The site still exists, with his 12k articles still in the archive, and having changed hands again in 2015. I was shocked, I remember, by that step, and maybe even more puzzled by what the buyer thought they were buying. Wasn’t it the author that drives the traffic to the blog, taking it with him when he leaves?

Since then we mostly followed each other on Facebook, and when I deleted my old Facebook account I lost track of his writing, mostly about the automotive industry. Until today, when on a random Austrian blog I found the news of his untimely death. It’s odd. I feel like I’m currently in a resurgence of blogging, and part of that is reconnecting to the history of the web we lost. A history now long enough to lose people who are part of it.

dat wars, that’s it, was the title of the last posting on his old blog in January 2009.

dat wars.