The Failed Promise of Digital Content: a recap, part 3

We were promised exhaustive libraries of digital content available anytime and anywhere, but those promises have come up short.
Since May 2009, I have written about the shortcomings of the Internet and digital media when it comes to content – music, video, archived information, etc. I published a recap of the first 20 parts of the series on Nov. 3, 2010, and the next 20 parts on July 5, 2014.
Here is an index of parts 41 to 50 of the series “The Failed Promise of Digital Content.”

Part 41: Online information vanishing for variety of reasons
Part 42: Some TV shows likely will never get released on DVD
Part 43: 14 notable TV shows not available on DVD
Part 44: 16 notable movies never released on DVD in the U.S.
Part 45: Ownership of music, movies and software slipping away
Part 46: Authors can sign paper books, but not e-books
Part 47: Some music still not available for download or streaming
Part 48: Link rot scourge continues
Part 49: Some deleted web content preserved by ‘fair use’
Part 50: Father of the Internet warns of a ‘digital Dark Age’

Photo: I Can Has Cheezburger? Lolcats.

Father of the Internet warns of a ‘digital Dark Age’

Last month, Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the modern Internet and now an executive at Google, warned that digital documents and other files available today might be inaccessible in the future.
Constant updates to computer software and hardware could make older file formats unreadable years from now, Cerf said. If something isn’t done to ensure backwards compatibility to old file formats, we could be face a “digital Dark Age,” where much of the information from the 21st Century is lost, he said.
Cerf is promoting an idea called “digital vellum,” which involves preserving content by having software that can interpret old file formats.
With so much of our information – documents, photos, videos, etc. – stored in digital formats, it’s a scary thought that that information could be irretrievable in the future.

Related stories: 

Google’s Vint Cerf warns of ‘digital Dark Age’ (BBC; Feb. 13, 2015)

Why the ‘Father of the Internet’ Thinks You Should Print Out Your Photos (Time; Feb. 14, 2015)

Father of the internet: ‘If we don’t move now, we risk losing all the data we’ve created in the 21st century’ (Business Insider; Feb. 20, 2015)

Cerf Warns Of A ‘Lost Century” Caused By Bit Rot; Patents And Copyright Largely To Blame (Techdirt; Feb. 20, 2015)

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf predicts the future, fears Word-DOCALYPSE (The Register; June 5, 2013)

Will your Internet data still be there in 100 years? (CNN; June 22, 2012)

Photo: Light in the Darkness by Flickr user Martinak15.

‘The 100’ is TV’s most underrated show

One of the failings of TV criticism is that reviews of a new series are often based on the first episode or few and then not followed up. So a TV drama that starts slowly and goes from good to great isn’t noticed.
Such is the case with the CW’s “The 100,” now in its second season.
The series started out as a CW version of “Lord of the Flies,” cast with the network’s usual assortment of attractive young men and women.
In the first season, 100 juvenile prisoners from an orbiting space colony are sent to the Earth’s surface as guinea pigs to see if the planet is habitable nearly a century after a nuclear war. After losing their communications link to the station, the kids go primal and start to turn on each other. But they have to band together to fight territorial warriors dubbed the Grounders. The first-season finale introduced the Mountain Men, a new group for the protagonists to contend.
The first season of “The 100” got off to a decent start and then kept getting better.
“The 100” earned a Metacritic score of 63, signifying generally favorable reviews.
Critics didn’t have the benefit of viewing the entire season of “The 100” before they gave it thumbs up or down. Almost all the reviews were posted in March 2014 around the premiere, save for one from January 2014.
In the second season, “The 100” went from good to great, with richer character development, fun plot twists and exciting action scenes. Of course, there are no reviews of season two of “The 100” on Metacritic.
I compare “The 100” to HBO’s “Game of Thrones” in terms of story sweep, violence and body count. The producers aren’t afraid to kill off a main character or to throw a curve.
“The 100” is by no means perfect. You have to overlook a lot of scientific implausibility. But it’s a great ride. “The 100” season finale is Wednesday. Thankfully, “The 100” has been renewed for a third season.

Some deleted web content preserved by ‘fair use’

When an online resource that you’ve bookmarked disappears, someone else on the web may have preserved at least some of that information.
A lot of copying, aggregating and curating happens on the Internet. Some of it crosses the line into copyright infringement when full articles and photo galleries are lifted and republished without permission. But much of this activity is “fair use.”
For instance, critics and journalists often need to sample works to discuss their artistic merit, societal impact or newsworthiness. “Fair use” is a right not an exception to copyright law, as Techdirt explains.
Recently, for my series on interesting websites, I tried to revisit a Tumblr blog that featured famous music album covers minus dead members. The website, called Live!, devised a clever way to illustrate how much musical talent is no longer with us.
But it’s now offline, no doubt deleted because of Tumblr’s disregard for “fair use” rights. Likely a record label or three complained to Tumblr under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that their album covers were used without permission. Of course they were, but the artist didn’t need permission to use them. These are clearly transformative works. They don’t diminish the value of the original works or take away potential album sales.
As I’ve written before, Tumblr is the absolute worst website for remix artists and web curators to use. Tumblr listens to large media companies but not to its users when it comes to copyright issues.
In October, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produced a chart showing which websites were the best and worst at “Protecting Your Speech from Copyright & Trademark Bullies.” Tumblr was far and away the worst, scoring a big fat zero in five categories.
But I digress.
Despite Tumblr’s best effort to delete the content of the Live! I See Dead Peoples blog, other websites that reported on its works preserved many of its images. Those websites include Laughing Squid, PetaPixel and Gizmodo.
Tumblr is responsible for a lot of link rot as it deletes users’ blogs. In 2013, it summarily deleted my three Tumblr blogs after one photographer complained about a couple of his pictures being on just one of those blogs.
Other websites copied the photos from my blog, LFL Wardrobe Malfunctions, and made their own galleries. They exist online today, including the disputed photos, because they’re hosted on services that are more respecting of fair use than Tumblr.
Another website that disappeared is Hot Olympic Girls, a pictorial of beautiful female athletes in the Olympics. But thankfully for admirers of the female form, its photos were preserved on a Facebook page called Hot Olympic Girls.

Photos: Cover of the Beatles album “Abbey Road” without John Lennon and George Harrison; snowboarder Elena Hight from Hot Olympic Girls.

Link rot scourge continues

If you’ve ever bookmarked a webpage and got an error message when you tried to visit it later, you’ve experienced the effects of link rot.
Disappearing webpages and online articles are part of the here-today, gone-tomorrow nature of the Internet. It’s also the biggest failed promise of digital content.
Last June, I ran an online tool from BrokenLinkCheck.com to look for broken links on Tech-media-tainment. The service processed 1,178 web pages and found 570 broken links. I took me hours to clear out the dead links.
On Feb. 20, I ran the Online Broken Link Checker tool again. It processed 1,317 web pages and found 85 broken links. It’s alarming how many links to articles and websites went bad in just eight months.
Since last summer, some of those weblinks died when websites went under or were acquired. More common were websites sunseting articles or changing their URLs. This is most common with old media like newspapers and magazines. Digital news organizations treat their articles with more respect.
In some cases I was able to find articles with changed URLs by doing searches on a media company’s website. Other times I located the content on other websites.
If the Internet is going to be a trustable resource for research, the scourge of link rot must end.

Photos: 404 error pages from broken links on Tech-media-tainment. From top, CNet error page, Oscar.com error page, and Vanity Fair error page.

New Yorker magazine still obsessed with people looking at their smartphones

Last October, I wrote about how the New Yorker magazine had run a bunch of covers showing people glued to their mobile devices.
Well, the New Yorker’s fixation with people addicted to their smartphones continues.
Check out the cover of the Nov. 24, 2014, issue and two alternate covers for the Feb. 23 & March 2, 2015, double issue.

Post-apocalyptic television show trend enters parody stage

With the premiere tonight of “The Last Man on Earth” on Fox, there will be 10 post-apocalyptic themed television shows currently airing.
But the trend could be nearing an end because the latest show is a comedy. Usually hot movie and TV trends run their course when they hit the parody stage.
“The Last Man on Earth” stars Will Forte as the title character. The series has received mostly positive reviews, scoring 77 out of 100 on Metacritic.
Meanwhile, NBC recently ordered a comedy series called “Apocalypse,” which stars Rob Lowe, Megan Mullally and Jenna Fischer.
“The set-up: A comet is on an unavoidable collision course toward Earth and one extended family must navigate the societal chaos that ensues,” Entertainment Weekly reported. “Characters include a foul-mouthed priest, an unhinged white supremacist, a mild-mannered bank manager, a germ-phobic cyber-terrorist, a five-star general and a child who (possibly) rose from the dead.”
Another sign that the post-apocalyptic TV show trend is over: broadcasters have pulled the plug on two post-apocalyptic shows in production.

Check out: List of post-apocalyptic TV shows.

Photos: Advertising for “The Last Man on Earth.”