Tech pundit Robert X. Cringely's new web-only TV show, NerdTV, features smart people talking at length about important stuff.
Though a bit crude, NerdTV is brainy enough to surprise anyone who thinks original web content consists of cheap satires and low-rent flash animation.
The interview show, now being webcast, will feature long-form interviews with stars of the high-tech industry, a perfect cast for a web series.
NerdTV's initial 13-episode season, which rolls out over the next three months, features PayPal's Max Levchin and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy. It wraps in late November with Linux guru Linus Torvalds.
Cringely is well-qualified to serve as producer and host. He's a former columnist for InfoWorld, the author of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, and now blogs for PBS, which created NerdTV.
For the first episode, Cringely offered the guest seat to Andy Hertzfeld, a programming genius who wrote software for the first generation of Mac computers. Over the course of the unedited 65-minute show, Cringley asked Hertzfeld about the stifling influence of Microsoft, the personality traits of programmers and the revolutionary possibilities of open-source software.
The show is downloadable and is issued under a Creative Commons license, meaning interested parties can use the footage in their own movies.
It is, no doubt, interesting material. Hertzfeld is an articulate and attentive subject. He dishes on Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and offers some forward-looking propositions, including a business model for open-source software. Cringely, a skilled interviewer, knows his stuff and steers the conversation in productive directions.
But by the end of the hour-long interview -- a long time to keep the energy level up -- NerdTV has worn out its welcome. Knowing the transcript was available at Cringely's website, I started fussing, then multitasking, figuring I wouldn't miss anything if I sent out a couple of quick e-mails.
Cringely will surely refine the show as the season progresses. One lesson from episode one: Turn off your cell phone.
But without additional resources -- a second camera and an editor? a shiny round table? -- NerdTV is not likely to be an important moment in web TV history.
Episode one will be of great interest to Mac cultists. But one imagines that PBS would prefer that the series reach beyond the small clique of hard-core geeks.
