A bit of history
Between 1983 and 1985, piero scaruffi (who at the time was a software engineer
working on the soon-to-be-named-Internet) created his first e-zine, distributed
by e-mail over the soon-to-be-named-Internet.
Between 1986 and 1990 he created an online database, downloadable via ftp.
That database mutated into his own website in 1995, after the World Wide Web
was invented. It became one of the
very first websites, and possibly the first website ever to carry the name
of its owner (for lack of imagination).
So www.scaruffi.com has existed in one form or another since the 1980s.
That accounts for its high ranking with the most popular search engines (it
pre-existed them) and for the huge amount of pages that it contains: those
pages have been written over a long period of time.
In 2006 the New York Times ran an article about www.scaruffi.com that was titled "The Greatest Web Site Of All Time" (October 15, 2006, Arts & Leisure section page 26).
In 2007 the government of mainland China banned piero's website,
that was no longer visible by one billion Chinese people (no idea why).
The philosophy of life behind this website
The philosophy is very simple. Today's culture is biased towards business.
I discuss culture without paying any attention to what sells.
I am interested in great artists, musicians, writers, etc, regardless of
how the business and the establishment perceives them.
I also try to apply a historical perspective: history is my main interest.
A note about language: what is in English and what is not?
The original goal was to make this website multilingual. Fifty thousand pages
later, that goal is becoming a bit unrealistic. Currently the website is in a
phase of transition and might remain there forever:
- Science is all in English
- Pictures of my trips are all in English
- History is all in English
- Politics is all in English
- Art is all in English
- Travel is all in English
- Rock Music is in Italian before the 1990s, and both in English and Italian from the 1990s on (the history of rock music is entirely in English) and partly translated in Chinese
- Jazz Music is all in English
- Avantgarde Music is in Italian before the 1990s, and both in English and Italian afterwards
- Cinema is all in Italian (and very old) except for the lists of best movies
Literature is mainly in Italian (and also very old) except the general timelines
- Poetry is part in English and part in Italian (as originally published) and part in Chinese
(Why Italian? A tribute to my roots. I wish I had room to publish also
translations in other languages).
In all sections that are several hundreds pages of listings, news and ratings
that are multilingual. The language-dependent parts are the profiles of
musicians/directors and the reviews of records/movies.
A note about the format
To prove the point that my opinions are unbiased, even this very website
is built against the advice of just about everybody I know:
- I dislike graphics. Pictures slow down your computer. When you want to look at
pretty pictures, you go to a museum. You browse the web to find information,
as quickly as possible.
- I limit advertising as much as possible, no matter how lucrative it could be.
Intrusive advertising (such as pop-up pages) annoys visitors.
- This is not a website to praise everything and everybody. On the contrary,
it criticizes a lot.
- No, there is no business plan for this website.
My only business plan is never to make money out of this website.
If you are an investor, look elsewhere.
Every single person I know has advised me to do the opposite of these points.
