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The art of Don E. Knuth
Computing's philosopher king argues for elegance in programming -- and a Pulitzer Prize for the best written.
By Mark Wallace
[09/16/99]

Silicon Follies
Silicon Follies
Chapter 53: Paul flames out; Liz and Laurel cash in.
By Thomas Scoville
[09/15/99]

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The modest inventor
"Weaving the Web" holds the promise of a facinating tell-all book about how Tim Berners-Lee created the Web -- but it just doesn't tell all that much.
By Scott Kirsner
[09/15/99]

Review
Dreaming of Dreamcast
Stunning graphics make the gaming console a delight to play -- but it'd be even better if Sega got the Net component working.
By Janelle Brown
[09/14/99]

Technology: View from the top
Broadband warrior
Tom Jermoluk takes on everyone from America Online to the local phone company in his bid to connect with the consumer.
By Mark Gimein
[09/13/99]

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With that, visitors are launched into a series of online "shows," consisting of film shorts, "humorous" news, an episodic serial and something called "Girl's Locker Talk." A sample of what you'll see: four guys reminiscing about getting laid at homecoming; a gaggle of nervous girls giggling about how to prolong an erection ("Feed them lots of chicken. It makes them go longer"); a news "anchor" joking about donkey penises; and a sitcom about Venice Beach featuring an oaf named "Danger -- that's short for Dangerous." That is, that's what you get when your RealPlayer plug-in isn't frozen with a "Net congestion, Buffering" message.

If this is the future of online entertainment, it's bleak. And it is aggravatingly similar to the failed, high-profile entertainment networks of the past. A slew of new Hollywood Internet companies like WireBreak, Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), Entertaindom, Atom Films and others promise cutting-edge concepts -- but a glance back at recent Net history like the one provided by "Digital Babylon: How the Geeks, the Suits, and the Ponytails Fought to Bring Hollywood to the Internet," a new book chronicling the initial rise and fall of online entertainment, makes it glaringly apparent that the industry hasn't evolved much from the Web's early days.

Digital Babylon: How the Geeks, the Suits, and the Ponytails Fought to Bring Hollywood to the Internet By John Geirland and Eva Sonesh-Kedar Arcade Publishing 288 pages

Rewind to 1996, when the Web was still dominated by blink tags, and "sticky" referred to the frosting on your cinnamon bun, not the way to ensure repeat visits to your site. Then, the hot spot online was in fact an episodic serial called "The Spot." It used a diary format and lots of cheesecake photos of bodacious babes in itsy-bitsy bikinis to tell the ongoing story of a houseful of oversexed people in their 20s. For a while in 1996, it was among the most popular sites on the Web, and was the first online "soap opera."

For a time in 1996 and early 1997, online soap operas and episodic serials were all the rage. American Cybercast, the company producing "The Spot," also produced a sci-fi soap called "Eon4" and an ad-agency exposé called "The Pyramid"; Microsoft launched its splashy MSN network with two sexy serialized sitcoms and a dozen other "shows"; Time Warner hosted a hipster rip-off of "The Spot" called "The East Village"; even the indie Web studio Cyborganic worked on some episodics, including a "real-life soap opera" about Web workers called "Geek Cereal." By Christmas 1996, more than 100 Web serials were listed in Yahoo; everyone was gambling that this was the future of online content.

The experiment was a dismal failure. Two years later, most of those shows are digital graveyards or have ceased to exist. The demise of these early entertainment ventures is portrayed in "Digital Babylon." Written by John Geirland and Eva Sonesh-Kedar, this first book to focus its lens on the early days of Hollywood's online experiments offers a cautionary tale for those who aspire to launch themselves into Round 2 of interactive entertainment. As Geirland and Sonesh-Kedar put it in the introduction, "It's time to reflect on the story of the first wave of pioneers, to build on their successes and avoid repeating their mistakes as we speed wildly into the next era."

Next page | How do the geeks, suits and ponytails fit in?