bianca.com
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bianca.com is an alternative virtual community that was created on 14 February 1994 by a group of Chicago (Later moved to San Francisco) dot-com software developers including David Thau and Christopher Miller. bianca was the world's first web-based chat room.[citation needed] It later also became a popular theme camp at Burning Man.
The site has long been infamous for its extreme free speech and raucous discourse, and its sociological effect on the Internet and elsewhere has been extensively detailed in a thesis by "Freeform" (Miller), [1] who studies bianca-style chat rooms as a sort of petri dish for incubating deviant behavior:
Initially the posts in bianca's chat rooms could be of any length. If a user had a 100 line long poem they wanted to post, the chat software would have accepted and posted it. This was acceptable when bianca was a smaller more closely knit community. However, as bianca grew more popular, racist homophobic hate mongers eventually found their way to bianca, and they too could post 100 line long rants if they pleased. As the bianca site prides itself on allowing all users freedom of speech, the content of these hateful messages was not a problem. However, these individuals posted their rants over and over and over again, totally disrupting the feel of the room, and almost bring the system to its knees. [2]
In 1997 Radio Shack sought to prevent bianca's "Smut Shack" from using that name, citing their previous use of the word "shack" and claiming exclusive use. They later backed down from their legal action.
In 1999 the site was purchased by professional pornography site Nerve.com, but by 2001 they'd given up on the venture due to excessive bandwidth costs. Nerve announced bianca's impending closure, though Thau vowed to find a way to preserve at least part of the site. [3]
In its final days as a fully operational web site, bianca’s was the target of hacking and cyber attacks. When one of the hackers was able to get into the sites server and delete the content that marked the end of Bianca Evidence of the attacks can still be found on what little text remains on the skeleton of the site
[edit] bianca.org
The sister-site bianca.org houses some information about the core group involved with bianca.com-related real world activities. This site claims:
bianca.org is the real-world extension of the online community known as bianca.com, which doesn't necessarily mean that we bare [sic] [sic] any resemblance or likeness to any of the activities of bianca.com but we do take our name and spirit from that which is the great bianca!
