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.

The Jayhawks are back with legendary lineup

It's been 15 years since Mark Olson and Gary Louris both performed in The Jayhawks but the full band is back with a new album and tour. It's been way too long. 

WNYC's "Soundcheck" episode above features a mix of old and new tunes, as well as short interviews with host John Schaefer. The set closes with "Blue," which for the life of me was never a hit for them or anyone else smart enough to cover it. This is Americana at its best. 

I'm not a huge fan of the band, but whenever I put on "Sound of Lies" (the band's 1997 album and first without Olson), I think, "Man, this is so awesome. I need to listen to this more." For some reason I don't. (note to self: Must not be so stupid).