Geek News and Musings

A couple of days ago Reddit user Jeff Ubelhor was talking to his friends about something or other and Space Jam, the movie starring Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan, came up (he swears they weren’t stoned). They checked on the website and realized that it hadn’t been touched since 1996. “From there I decided to post it on Reddit,” says Ubelhor “Because I thought it was hilarious, not only the design, but just how different Internet marketing was 14 years ago.”

The rest is Internet meme history. On December 29th, artist, professor and FAT Labs member Steve Lambert was given a link to the site by a student in his Hacking 101 class, posted it to the FAT Labs email list and tweeted it out as “The original Warner Brothers “Space Jam” movie website has been left untouched since 1996,“ his one time student, Buzzfeed founder and most viral human alive Jonah Peretti retweeted it, without giving him credit.

Both tweets were retweeted hundreds of times and the next thing you know Lambert was receiving emails like this:

From: “XXXXX”
Date: December 29, 2010 4:23:21 PM EST
To:

Subject: CBC News: SpaceJam tweet

Hi Steve,

I’m a reporter/anchor with CBC TV news in Toronto. Your SpaceJam tweet was trending locally for a couple of hours in Toronto, and was spread widely through our office. We’re going to a bit about it on our local supperhour newscast tonight.

Just wondering, do I credit you (through one of your students) as the originator of the tweet? Any comments on how many retweets you’ve generated?

Thanks,

XXXXX

And it wasn’t only Canadian TV stations that showed an interest. Since the Reddit post the site has been picked up by Buzzfeed (obviously), Huffington Post, Boing Boing, Geekosystem, Yahoo Sports, Slashfilm and countless others. Sister blog Urlesque, taking the phenomenon as evidence of a resurgence in interest in old movie sites, just published a post called “Old Official Movie Sites – Titanic, Air Bud, Event Horizon and More.” Sigh.

The original Reddit thread has over 2015 votes and 686 comments, including such meta and self-aware gems as “I wonder if we’re DDOSing a weakling 1996 server in an abandoned building somewhere right now” and “Browsing this on my droid x while moving 70mph. 1996 just shit their pants.”

Since Peretti and Lambert’s tweets, the bit.ly link has received over 57K total clicks, over 40K in one day. And that is just clicks on the link Peretti tweeted out which are nowhere near the traffic the site probably got all in all.  Peretti estimates that the Space Jam site could easily have garnered around 500K views since hitting the front page of Reddit shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning, and gleaning from my web editorial experience I’m pretty sure that number is in the right ballpark. I’ve reached out to Warner Bros for the exact traffic stats.

A lot changes in 14 years and some things don’t. While the site’s original designer Jen Braun is “still working on the web,” Assistant to the Designer Andrew Strachler is now VP of Interactive Marketing at Warner Bros.

In 2010, computers are faster, monitors are thinner, social networking has exploded and we are now browsing the web on our mobile phones, among other things. But we’re all still staring at this silly looking website from 1996.

You could just chalk up this week’s explosion of the Space Jam site to an extremely slow holiday news cycle, but it’s much more than that. We’re now in the very last hours of the most fast-paced decade ever technology-wise, and that is a little scary. In this era of Word Lens and Self-Driving Cars, perhaps some of us are more than a little nostalgic for simpler times when “having a website, no matter how bad, was an achievement in itself.”

is a new site that claims to not be your “grandma’s phonebook.” This is because it pulls a ton of info about you from all over the web into one place. And I mean a ton. More than you might be comfortable with in fact. But luckily you can remove yourself from their database by following these simple instructions. Thanks for the heads up on that one Chris.

A few hours to go until 2011, and I’m busy drawing up my list of New Year’s resolutions. A major one: to stop writing about TechCrunch commenters. After all, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, it’s like wrestling with a pig: you both get dirty and the pig enjoys it.

Still, that leave me just enough time – eight hours, and counting – to sneak in one last journey over to the dark side. And perhaps it’s fitting that the final salvo in my war against trolls has a happy ending. A Christmas miracle, even.

It began this past Christmas day when I wrote a short post wishing TechCrunch readers a merry Christmas. Sure enough, within a few hours, the usual rag-tag band of trolls, freaks and illiterates who skulk around in the TechCrunch commentsphere arrived. One responder jumped in to call me “A TOTAL f c k i n g RIGHT WING N U T C A S E” (caps theirs), adding “the twat doesn’t know shat about tech and worse doesn’t care for ‘PEOPLE’”. Another (now deleted for reasons that will become clear in a moment) stood out for a couple of reasons: firstly, for addressing me as “bro” and secondly for his wish that I would “die a non-journalist”.

Wishing someone to die – journalist or not – struck me as a particularly un-Christmassy wish; so un-Chrismassy infact, that I felt driven to reply, pointing out the various misspellings in his comment and offer seasons’ greetings to TechCrunch’s “illiterate college student readership.”

And that would normally be that. Generally speaking, anonymous trolls, like cockroaches, tend to scurry away the moment you shine a light on their idiocy.

But this is where the Christmas miracle kicked in. An few hours later I received an email – via the contact form on my personal website – from the commenter in question. I’m not going to tell you exactly what he wrote, suffice it to say that he wanted to say sorry. No, really.

Moreover, he wrote to say that, prompted by my sarcastic reply, he’d been driven to read some of the things I’d written in the past about trollishness and Internet anonymity and, more generally, my struggles with drinking and trying not to be a complete and total bastard. The result of his this reading had been a complete change of heart: the one-time troll felt like crap for being mean on the Internet, much like I feel bad for all the people I hurt while I was drinking.

I read the email at least half a dozen times before I could even start to think how to reply. Somehow our relationship had flipped on its head: now it was me who felt bad for being so quick to swat down his trollish comment. After all, even the most unpleasant little anonymous troll comment could have been written by a fundamentally good person who is having a bad day.

I sent my new friend a preview PDF of my new (to be published in 2011) book, partly as a way to say “apology accepted” but also to reassure him that, no matter how much of a shit he feels for wishing me dead on TechCrunch, he still has a long way to go before he can compete with me on the dickish behaviour front.

As I say, a Christmas miracle. And a reminder for everyone involved that the people we write about online are actually real people.

All of which got me thinking about my own trollish past, and reminded me that I still owe a correction – an apology even – for something I wrote almost eight years ago, back in 2003, during my very first stint writing for the Guardian. At the time I was 23 years old and so, of course, I knew everything there was to know, not just about media and technology but about the Whole Entire World. And it was with that authority that I wrote an 800 word column about how Salon.com – then a mere eight years old – was struggling to attract enough paid readers to break even. They’d spent an impressive $81 million dollars to attract a relatively modest 60,000 subscribers – $1,300 per ($30 a year) subscriber as I cockily pointed out.

How many Salon.com editors does it take to change a lightbulb? Ten. One to change the bulb and the other nine to piss $81m (£50m) up a wall. Not funny, but true.

And my mocking didn’t stop there. I went on to suggest that it was time for Salon to accept reality – that they’ve failed to prove that people want to pay for their particular brand of unremarkable journalism, and so should get out of the way and let other online publications have a chance to shine. Other online publications like the one, back in 2003, I just happened to be in the process of launching.

Even by my own 23-year-old standards, the column was screamingly disingenuous and mean spirited; spurred far more by my competitive instincts than by any honest appraisal of their prospects or standards of journalism.

“If you listen carefully you can almost hear the sound of money gurgling away. Advertisers’ money, investors’ money, subscribers’ money. Glug, glug, glug. It’s fair to say that had [Managing Editor, Scott] Rosenberg been the star of Brewster’s Millions, the film would have ended after about eight minutes.”

And so it’s appropriate then that over the next seven years, Salon enjoyed a near-constant succession of last laughs. Despite various false starts with paywalls and part-paywalls and “please help save independent journalism” pledge drives, they had their first profitable quarter in early 2005 and have kept their heads above water ever since. Not only that, but their journalism – both the quirky lifestyle stuff and their harder news reporting – has got better and stronger with every passing day. The publication reached another high point two weeks when Glenn Greenwald wrote a searing critique of the treatment of PFC Bradley Manning in Quantico. A week later, the United Nations announced an investigation into Manning’s treatment.

Along with Gmail, Arts and Letters Daily, the BBC and – oh, please - TechCrunch, it’s one of the five sites that I check every single day without fail. With 2011 looking sure to be the year of the iPad and ebook reader, it’s easy to see Salon.com becoming even more popular – and profitable – in the coming months.

So, yes, prompted by the Damascene conversion of one of my own former critics, I figured it’s about time I made amends for the trollish behaviour of my early-20s self. Sorry Salon, you were right and I was dramatically wrong and the landscape of online journalism is all the better for that fact.

Ok?

Ok.

Happy New Year everyone.

It’s time for a special New Years-themed edition of OMG/JK, and we’ve really gone all out with our costumes. From shiny hats to incredibly cheap kazoos, we’re ready to ring in 2011 with a bang. Oh, and we’ve got some technology to talk about.

Because there hasn’t been much major news in the tech world this week, we decided to spend most of the show discussing some of the big trends that are inevitably going to make headlines throughout 2011. From Apple’s likely push to the cloud to the consumer launch of ChromeOS and Android’s arrival on tablets we’ve got a lot to look forward to — and we’re not afraid to make some predictions.

Subscribe to us on iTunes!

It’s New Year’s Eve, and there’s nothing that compliments a glass of celebratory champagne better than reflecting on the past year in technology news (really, it’s a blast). One of the best roundups just went up over on Techmeme, which has posted its annual “quasi-objective” list of the top 50 stories based how many links and citations each post received.

The top five stories shouldn’t come as a surprise, but they’re a good reminder of what’s gone on this year (apparently people like to write about Google and Apple):

1. Gizmodo’s huge iPhone 4 scoop

2. Steve Jobs bashing Flash

3. Google’s decision to stop censoring Google.cn after detecting hacking attempts

4. Google’s decision to mostly abandon its Nexus One experiment, which could have proven very disruptive to carrier/device lock-in.

5. And the Consumer Reports announcement that it could not recommend the iPhone 4, which elevated ‘antennagate‘ to a new level (and prompted Apple to hold an event to discuss the device’s reported signal issues).

Google has also posted a roundup of its own, recapping the 454 posts it published on the Official Google Blog this year. Google says that 24,768,052 unique vistors visited the blog — an increase of 70% over last year, though most of this stemmed from Google’s April Fools joke, where it claimed it was renaming the company to Topeka. I like our April Fools jokes better.
Ignoring the April Fools Joke, which had over ten times more views than any of the company’s actual news (a mildly depressing data point), Google’s top story was the ‘new approach to China’ referenced above. The second biggest story was Google’s post announcing ChromeOS — which was actually published in 2009 but has continued to draw attention, and finally had its big launch earlier this month. Rounding out the top five were Google’s announcement that it would install a fiber network in a still-undisclosed city, its decision to kill off Google Wave, and the launch of Google Places.

Image by Brian Solis

Audiophiles [xkcd via Laughing Squid]

Salon.com picks its top movie scenes of the year. Let Me In, the English remake of Let The Right One In, wins top spot. Its chosen scene, a botched murder attempt by the young vampire’s protector, combines the Swedish original’s muted efficiency with slick Hollywood tension-building tricks.

Shot for shot, beat for beat, it’s the scene of the year, laying a foundation of succinct but meaningful shots and then building a madhouse on top of it. The pièce de résistance — you’ll know it when you see it — is one of the great recent examples of show-off filmmaking in service of story. The universe has been turned upside-down.

It’s a shame the new version of this movie — hailed as a rare example of a remake as good as its inspiration — didn’t do so well in the box office.

Let Me In [Salon]

Here are two long-lost Partnership for a Drug Free America produced video spots about Straight Edge. I’m not sure when these were made, but judging by the band logos in some of the shots, I’m going to guess mid to late 90’s. This is noteworthy because until 1997, most of PDFA’s funding came from Alcohol and Tobacco companies. After ‘97, they distanced themselves from those companies, but continue to receive much funding from pharmaceutical companies.

While anything spreading the word about Straight Edge is good, this is amusing because the legal and socially acceptable drugs SxE is most associated with being outspoken against (alcohol and tobacco) are the same drugs PFDA spent so many years ignoring while trying to make the public think of “drugs” as only the illegal stuff. Of course, once the major cash from those companies got cut off, so did the PFDAs public profile. When was the last time you saw one of those “this is your brain on drugs” ads?

[ Video Link #1 | Video Link #2 ]

Thanks Luke!

It’s New Year’s Eve and you know what that means — an adult beverage or two might be had by many people around the world this evening. That includes many TechCrunch staffers. And while drunk blogging is generally frowned upon, it would be interesting to see what the site would look like if everyone wrote while intoxicated. (Yes, yes, insert the NOT THAT DIFFERENT joke here.) Luckily, Zaraguza Digital has created a web app to allow us to see such a site without any of the risk (or the hangover).

Simply visit this link and start moving the slider along the bottom to set the blood alcohol level. Obviously, at 0.0, things look normal. At 0.5, things look fine for the most part with a few more typos. At about 1.5 to 2.0 things start getting fun. And clearly, our developers would be getting in on some hardcore drunk coding action as well.

In all seriousness though, thanks for reading TechCrunch this year and stay safe tonight. Happy New Year!

TC at 0.0

TC at 0.5

TC at 1.0

TC at 1.5

TC at 2.0

TC at 2.5

TC at 3.0

TC at 7.0

“I’m not sure what it does, but they said they sell a lot of them,” explains our internet friend Monkey, who sends along this image.

The label reads, “AMBUSHED: The 436 Billion Dollar Deficit Man.”

« Previous entries