Grantland takes on MTV's early history

I wrote a few months ago about ESPN's new digital magazine Grantland and its commitment to stray beyond its foundation in sports. 

The latest evidence of that is a fantastic hourlong podcast on the early history of MTV hosted by gonzo journalist Chuck Klosterman (author of one of my favorite music books "Fargo Rock City.") 

Klosterman chats with Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, authors of "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution," on the origins of the network; why execs embraced Spring Break content (think beer money); why British New Wave bands got airplay over American acts, specifically black artists; and why hair-metal bands were among the few artists to show up on time for MTV appointments. There's even an interesting discussion of Billy Squier's "Rock Me Tonite" video, which Squier said effectively ended his career. 

This is a podcast that's great fun and informative, and one that makes me want to read the book, which hits stores in late October.

A digital Pompei

The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.

Regular readers know how I feel about preserving our rapidly disappearing history. So I was thrilled to learn about efforts to save the Geocities from the trash heap.

A fascinating effort from the Internet Archive called The Deleted City is dedicated to bringing back to life -- at least in read-only form -- Geocities.com, a once-thriving digital ecosystem of amateur community that Yahoo bought for $4 billion in the late '90s, then shuttered two years ago.

I never blamed Yahoo for pulling the plug on something that clearly was not making them money or pulling in traffic, but digital historians and the millions who created a Geocities page shuddered at the thought of so much ground-breaking digital history disappearing ... just like that.

The Deleted City is the safety valve, a data visualization of 641 gigabytes of Geocities data that "depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain." To think that so much data was not only saved but in a highly visual format is amazing.

It goes to show you what can be done when smart people put their heads together. And it's reassuring to know the folks at Internet Archive have a big project under their belt. Who knows when another once-dominant community -- say MySpace -- shows up on life support.

Qwikster, Kwickster and Qwickster

The Netflix debacle has spiraled into chaos so quickly that it's hard to know exactly where the company stands at any given moment. I initially gave Netflix some rope with its pricing strategy but started shaking my head when I learned they had launched their new Qwikster brand before checking to see whether the Qwikster Twitter handle was taken (it's not, and the "quirky" person who publishes at that domain is having a good time at Netflix's expense). D'oh!

Smelling dead meat, "Saturday Night Life" gave us a web-only update on Sunday, breaking news that Netflix's Qwikster spinoff has not been broken up into three subparts: Qwikster, Kwickster and Qwikster. 

Given Netflix's moves these past few weeks, I will not be surprised if any of this satire becomes reality.