budo.narod.ru was a website about Eastern martial arts, “Martial Arts of the Planet”, which existed on a third-level domain in the narod.ru zone from 2000. It was a Nizhny Novgorod site by registration: the address was listed in the city counter Counter.nn.ru[2] and in the nn.ru directory — the “catalogue of Nizhny Novgorod websites” — under the heading “Society and Nizhny Novgorod Residents : Sport”[5]. The pages gave neither a postal address nor a telephone number; the only contact was the mailbox budo@narod.ru[1]. Snapshots of the home page in the web archive run from 11 July 2000[1] to March 2018[10], but the address was a site of its own only during the first half of that span.

“Martial Arts of the Planet” in 2000

The earliest surviving snapshot, of 11 July 2000, shows a page with the masthead “MARTIAL ARTS OF THE PLANET” and a permanent menu of ten items: “Home”, “Practice”, “Karate-do”, “Wushu”, “Kendo”, “Aiki-do”, “Miscellaneous”, “Zen”, “Links”, “Photos”. Separate blocks held “Contact” — a guestbook, a forum and e-mail — and “Creative Work”, with poems. At the bottom stood “Copyright 2000”[1].

Half of the first screen was taken up by a news feed, which doubled as a list of additions — with a date and an indication of the section: 16 June, “Photos — Tameshiwari (a funny incident)”; 21 June, two items at once, “Practice — Meditations — Meditation” and “Practice — Miscellaneous — Psychological factors in the martial arts”; 22 June, “Karate — FSKA Funakoshi Shotokan Karate Association”; 23 June, “Wushu — Beautiful Spring — Wing Chun”; 26 and 27 June, karate again — “The three main stages of training and mastery” and “Biodynamics of striking movements in Shotokan karate and in boxing”; 29 June, “Practice — Miscellaneous — Ukemi-Waza”; 1 July, “Miscellaneous — Jigoro Kano. Ju-do”; 10 July, “Photos — Photographs of M. Ueshiba and others”[1]. Ten additions in under a month; the list also shows how the site was arranged — a library of articles and photographs sorted by school and by area of practice.

The range of subjects is outlined as well by the page’s technical keywords: “karate, wushu, aikido, hapkido, kendo, qigong, Oyama, Ueshiba, Funakoshi, way, east, yoga, traditions, judo, hapkido, Bruce, Lee, photo, conference, tameshiwari, energy, Ki, Qi, medicine, parapsychology”[1]. In the nn.ru catalogue the site was entered as “Martial Arts of the Planet. Everything about martial arts.” with the description “Martial arts: karate, aikido, judo, hapkido, kendo, wushu, zen”[5], and in the counter’s tables more briefly: “Martial Arts of the Planet. Masters and styles. Theory and practice. Conference.”[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The Counter.nn.ru counter provides the only surviving measure of the site’s prominence (for more on the method, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). In the overall ranking of 2 December 2000, “Martial Arts of the Planet” held thirteenth place: a counter reading of 159,551, a rating of 543.19, and 114 hits. The table was broken into pages of twenty entries each and ran at least into the six hundreds, so thirteenth place is the top two per cent of the list. Alongside it stood the “City Forum” at www.nn.ru (11th) and “NetCARS — Nizhny Novgorod” (12th), and above them the “Nizhny Novgorod Telegraph Agency” (4th) and the “Nizhny Novgorod OnLine” portal itself (5th)[2]. For an amateur page on narod.ru, such company — city portals and a news agency — was a rarity in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of those years.

In the September snapshot of the same year, where the overall list is sorted by number of hits, the site stood fifth: a counter reading of 123,434, a rating of 623.97, and 197 hits[4]. Over the autumn of 2000 the counter reading grew from 123,434 to 159,551 — by roughly 36,000 visits[2][4].

In the “Personalities” section of the same counter the site was second, yielding only to “Steven Seagal’s Aikido” — “the virtual dojo of Alexander Smirnov”: 542.71 against 1037.87[3]. In the sport section of the nn.ru directory, sorted by rating, “Martial Arts of the Planet” stood on the first line: 728.71 in April 2002 — more than twice the figure of the next entry, “Rhythmic Gymnastics For All” (306.78)[5]. In June 2002 the directory gave the site a rating of 998[6], in August 639[7]. Its neighbours in the section were Nizhny Novgorod sports pages: the club “Magnitnaya Strelka” (Magnetic Needle), the hockey club “Torpedo”, and “Nizhny Novgorod Runnersworld”[5].

Someone else’s placeholder in place of the site

When “Martial Arts of the Planet” stopped being updated the snapshots do not show: between 2002 and 2011 no saved copies of the home page are available to us. The snapshot of 4 November 2011 finds a different site already at the address. Instead of sections on the martial arts there is a page headed “Untitled”, with the items “Chat”, “Forum”, “Blogs”, “Photographs” and the notice “Sorry, the site is closed for reconstruction”. Visitors were led away to outside projects: kempo.ru, a “social network for martial arts”, and an “encyclopaedia of Buddhism”, while the bottom line offered Counter-Strike and “monitoring of cs game servers”. The copyright at the foot was someone else’s too: “Copyright © 2003—2007 kempo.ru”[8].

The news feed on this placeholder had frozen in April 2007 and consisted of short notes: 22 April, on Seraphim of Sarov and on “the preciousness of human life”; 12 April, on Buddhism, Milarepa and the “rainbow body”. One entry openly admitted to being filler: “the text of the brief description is given as a content component for a general example and for filling”[8].

After that the page did not change at all. The snapshots of 11 November 2014[9] and 7 March 2018[10] repeat it word for word, adding a single new line to the footer — “Hosting by uCoz”. The last saved copies of the address date from 2018[10]; a probe made while preparing this survey found no live page at the address. Of the site that in December 2000 ranked thirteenth in the overall ranking of Nizhny Novgorod resources, only these snapshots and lines in other people’s tables remain.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Overall counter.nn.ru ranking, December 2000 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru ranking, “Personalities” section, December 2000 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Overall counter.nn.ru ranking by hits, September 2000 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “Sport” section, April 2002 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “Sport” section, June 2002 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, “Sport” section, August 2002 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  10. web.archive.org — Home page, 2018 (archive)