I found the bits of Gizmodo Australia they didn’t kill (yet)

Gizmodo Australia was home to a lot of my work – and the work of a lot of other very fine Australian tech writers – over the years, and now it’s all gone.

Well… not quite all of it.

Note: This one has more to do with media than it does technology. Though technology does feature as part of it because… well, you’ll see.

I’ve written previously on the closure of Gizmodo Australia (along with Kotaku Australia and Lifehacker Australia), and since I wrote that, the actual sites themselves have been taken offline, which means that a couple of decades of work from a long list of very fine writers went up in digital smoke.

Bah, drat, blast and all that. That other Kidman chap wrote about it when the sites themselves vanished, and I kinda tipped him off on that.

OK, sure, Internet Archive and all that, but that’s incomplete and a bit of a pain to trawl though if we’re being honest. Recently it’s been having its own fun and games with downtime, too.

So it’s dead, Jim.

Well, there’s dead, and then, as Miracle Max once put it, there’s mostly dead.

Turns out, there’s a tiny fragmented pocked of Gizmodo Australia that lives on!

Well… lives is a slightly odd way of putting it, and I’m pretty sure that it’s just a question of absolutely nobody remembering that it existed in the first place.

See, I was thinking about some of the content that I’d been part of while working there, and one of the pieces was working out how we were going to review — and I swear, I’m not making this up — and inflatable remote controlled shark we got sent.

Serious journalism at its finest, I think you’ll agree.

But this wasn’t just a written article, as the cost of the helium and the time involved meant that it was also filmed (not well)… and I realised I hadn’t thought about that in years, or seen it for even longer.

And then a thought struck me. I wonder where that actually got uploaded to, all those years ago… and is it still there?

First stop (spoiler: only stop) — the Gizmodo Australia YouTube video channel.

Astonishingly, at the time of writing, it’s still there, and you can marvel at the work of Gizmodo Australia  editors going back up to 17 years.

Look, here’s OG Gizmodo Australia Editor Seamus Byrne (now at Byteside), meeting ASIMO

Anyone remember the HTC Dream? Nick Broughall (now at BTTR) probably doesn’t remember making this video, I suspect

I then hit a patch of videos featuring, well… me.

A considerably younger me, however, given that YouTube helpfully reminds me that this was 13 years ago.

One of the first video pieces – and indeed one of the first things I did for Gizmodo Australia when I was editor was try to kill a crash test dummy with a car:

Remember when Siri was new and… not that great?

Remember when lining up for new Apple products outside stores at midnight was a whole thing? It sounds absurd now… but it happened!

There are, it’s true, some pieces that seem to have fallen between the cracks, presumably because they were shot and uploaded to other services.

So there’s no sign of how bad Vegemite is when you put it through a soda stream, or the Bacon Thickshake, or for that matter everything that was done to a 5KG Gummi Bear (AKA the “Evil Candy Monstrosity”) that turned up in the office one day.

Hmm… maybe that’s for the best.

However, while the archive of what’s there does span quite a few years (and quite a few more editors again), there, amongst the library, was the video I was thinking of.

It still exists… for now.

Should it exist? Did anyone care but me? Here it is, in all its glory still-existence, the REMOTE CONTROLLED FLYING SHARK.

Filmed (if I recall correctly) on a Cisco Flip Video camera (which is why it looks so bad) by then Lifehacker Editor Angus Kidman, and complete with audio composed by an ex-Gizmodo editor (and at the time, Gizmodo Publisher) Danny Allen!

I guess Nine probably owns the rights to this stuff, though who knows whether it’s got the rights to still have a “Gizmodo” label on it any more?

This does run the risk of it being noticed and taken down just because I’m writing about it.

You can check out the final tiny remnants of Gizmodo Australia (for as long as they last) on YouTube here.