The Death of the Disc

Cooper here explains to us why the disc is dead, and eventually this may come to pass, however, Dr. Media says, oh really! Sean, please, while you make a great case, you forget a few interesting things. A case in point, reminds of how a few years ago the tech world was convinced that movies would be delivered by DBS to theaters and cans would be gone. Hasn't happened, why, cost , quality,etc. Why won't consumers leap on this, same reasons. If you can get a ipod type device that will pack as many films at high quality like music, then maybe, but until then a disc is the cheapest, best quality method of delivery.


technology
The Death of the Disc
Why HD-DVD and Blu-ray are dead on arrival.
By Sean Cooper
Posted Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006, at 12:57 AM ET

Until
recently, the history of home entertainment was the history of encoding
formats. For movies and music to get into our homes, manufacturers had
to invent some medium that was capable of holding Star Wars or ABBA Gold.
And so it went: vinyl, eight-track, cassette, Betamax, VHS, CD, DVD.
Our shelves filled with slabs of plastic, spools of magnetic tape
inside cartridges, and 5-inch discs stamped with binary-encoded metal
foil.

Now, home entertainment has a new idea: high-definition
video. By increasing the number of pixels in an image, HD encoding can
deliver a sharper picture. Because high-definition images pack more
visual data, HD movies require more storage space than DVDs can
provide. So, naturally, we've now got two new encoding formats: the
Toshiba-backed HD-DVD and Sony's Blu-ray.

The movie studios and
electronics manufacturers think—wrongly—these new high-def formats will
extend the market for home-entertainment media indefinitely. Both
formats will fail, not because consumers are wary of a format war in
which they could back the losing team, a la Betamax. Universal players
that support both flavors of HD should appear early next year. No, the
new formats are doomed because shiny little discs will soon be history.
Here are four reasons why.

The Internet. On Nov. 22, Microsoft will unveil its Xbox Live movie-rental
and download service—the first to include HD content. This is obviously
a shot across the bow of Sony's PlayStation 3, which includes a Blu-ray
player. (The Xbox 360 plays only standard DVDs out of the box.) The
significance of Xbox movie rentals reaches beyond the console wars,
though. For one, using the Xbox for over-the-wires delivery of HD
content removes the need for physical media. It also removes a key
barrier for iTunes-style sales of movies, particularly high-definition
movies: Once you download The 40-Year-Old Virgin in HD, how
do you get it from your computer to your plasma screen? Few people have
their PCs connected to their TVs. But every Xbox 360 is connected to a
TV, and most are connected to the Internet (to use Microsoft's Xbox
Live online gaming service). Don't have an Xbox? Similar services from
Apple, Netflix, and others will soon pour HD movies into homes using a
broadband connection and a cheap set-top box.

Cable on-demand.
Like Microsoft's console, your Comcast box is a fat-pipe conduit
between the company's inventory of HD content and your HDTV screen.
Furthermore, on-demand playback is immediate—you don't have to wait for
downloads to complete. Movie studios wary of siphoning money from DVD
sales have mostly avoided making new releases available on demand
(proof, perhaps, of on-demand's potential earning power down the road).
That's starting to change, though, and a premium tier of titles is now
hitting on-demand at the same time they're hitting Blockbuster. And
just as record labels' fears over music downloads were placated by
copy-protection schemes implemented by iTunes, Rhapsody, and other
online services, the cable companies will soon put together content
deals that make sense for the studios. Microsoft's Xbox movie rentals,
which expire 24 hours after they are downloaded, are a good example of
what those deals will look like.

New formats mean pricey hardware. After spending $3,000 or more on an HDTV and multichannel audio gear, nobody's in the mood
to burn another pile of cash. HD players aren't cheap: $350 to $600 for
HD-DVD and $750 to $1,000 for Blu-ray. Sony's decision to support
Blu-ray in the PlayStation 3 is a strong-arm tactic to drive demand for
Blu-ray-encoded movies. But this loss-leading move could sink Sony's
new console—and maybe even the whole company—when Blu-ray stalls out.

The rise of the hard drive.
When you buy a DVD, you pay for the cost of embedding a piece of
plastic with data, packaging it, shipping it to retailers, and stocking
it on shelves. Movie downloads require only the space necessary to
store the data on a hard drive for as long as you want to hold on to
it, either for a single viewing (in the case of rental downloads like
the Xbox 360's) or forever (archived on your computer or an external
drive). On iTunes an album costs about 10 bucks—as much as $8 less than
some CD retailers charge, partially because of the reduced cost of
getting music to buyers online. Look for the same savings when it comes
to downloading movies. And then there's the fact that hard-disk storage
capacities are pushing ever upward while size and price drop. In a few
years, you'll buy every episode of The West Wing on a drive the size of a deck of cards rather than on 45 DVDs in a box the size of your microwave oven. If you think that sounds far-fetched, consider that shortly after releasing a comprehensive, eight-DVD New Yorker collection (since updated to nine discs), the magazine released the same collection on an (admittedly expensive) iPod-sized hard drive. Which would you rather have, especially once the price of hard drives sinks even lower?

Make
no mistake: Buying movies online isn't there yet. Titles in
standard-def are few, in hi-def fewer still. With five times the visual
information of a standard-def flick, an HD download of The Matrix, were
it even available, could take all day over the average broadband
connection. And a simple, consumer-friendly system for storing, backing
up, and accessing a large movie library is probably a year or more off.
As for cable on-demand services, they are clumsy to use, lack a deep
back catalog, and lag behind DVD release schedules. (Meanwhile, DVDs
fit nicely on a shelf, rarely fail, and don't require annoying download
periods or sophisticated gear to get them to play on your TV.)

All
of that will change—and fast. It will change because consumers want it
to change. Music buyers used their modems to force the major labels
into the fear zone and Tower Records into bankruptcy. The same will
happen to the movie studios and DVD retailers unless they curb their
disc addiction.

Sean Cooper writes about music, technology, and pop culture for various publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
Why HD-DVD and Blu-ray are dead on arrival. - By Sean Cooper - Slate Magazin

Looking for Sleepers in a Wake-Up World - New York Times

Dr. Media, says, here we go, the message from Hollywood, is , tada, it's hard to make a hit movie, a sleeper hit movie no less. Like it isn't hard to make a nonsleeper hit ?? The most intriguing aspect of this piece is at the end where the author mentions that the Net buzz makes it harder to keep a sleeper under the radar. Well gee whiz, isn't the precise reason for a sleeper becoming a hit is the spreading of the word to go see it--see "Snakes on a Plane", a dumb horror flick that got buzzed into a money maker only from netbuzz, and disappeared as soon as the shine was off the title. The new way of creating a sleeper hit, in fact the best chance ever--see the music biz--is exposure via the net. At last there is a system in place which allows indie media makers the possibility of getting their stuff see by somebody in addition to film festival directors.



Looking for Sleepers in a Wake-Up World - New York Times: "October 8, 2006
Looking for Sleepers in a Wake-Up World
By STEPHEN FARBER

October 8, 2006

Looking for Sleepers in a Wake-Up World

By STEPHEN FARBER

Correction Appended

LOS ANGELES

"DEATH OF A PRESIDENT,” the controversial quasi documentary imagining the governmental and public response to the assassination of President Bush, was among the hottest tickets at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival. A movie that had almost no profile before the festival was suddenly a cause célèbre, winning an international critics’ prize for its boldness. Although most studios balked at distributing it, Newmarket Films, the company that released “The Passion of the Christ,” bought “Death of a President” and plans to rush it into release on Oct. 27, hoping for the kind of payoff that will make all those other nervous companies wish they had jumped in.

But even if it does well, “Death of a President,” already heavily exposed in the press and on the Web, can never become that most delicious of movie phenomena, a sleeper hit. A real sleeper seems to come from nowhere: the audience shows up before the experts and insiders have figured it out.

That kind of surprise is disappearing from a business where marketing has become increasingly sophisticated and Internet buzz quite deafening. “It’s a very transparent world these days,” said Marc Shmuger, the chairman of Universal Pictures. “Movies do not come out of the blue. As studio marketers have become more aggressive, all the freshness has been appropriated by the campaign. So it’s almost impossible to have a sleeper.”

The mythology of sleepers is endlessly appealing. Everyone loves an underdog and wants to believe that ordinary moviegoers have power over the studios’ behemoth marketing machines. Thus the thrill that accompanied “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” only four years ago, as it made the trip from low-budget bagatelle to outsize hit, with more than $241 million in domestic ticket sales.

Small films may still break out, of course. But it becomes ever less likely that they’ll actually outrun their own hype.

“Everyone is talking about a film before they see it,” observed Bob Berney, the president of the distribution company Picturehouse. “That is a new phenomenon.”

David Dinerstein, who has overseen marketing and distribution for specialty film divisions including Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics and now works as a consultant for the Yari Film Group, concurred. “It’s harder to sneak through the cracks,” he said. “Communication is so quick that you know almost immediately if you have a hit, or if your picture is doomed.”

In the past audiences actually did discover unheralded movies. In 1987 “Dirty Dancing,” a modest period piece, set in the early 60’s, about a young woman’s liberation during a summer at a Catskills resort, took the entire country by surprise and surpassed more heavily promoted movies at the box office. A decade later “The Full Monty,” a small British comedy with no name actors, earned $45 million in the United States (and much more around the world), was nominated for a best-picture Oscar and spawned a hit Broadway musical.

Whether “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), a tiny film that erupted in the marketplace, grossing $160 million for Artisan Entertainment, was a true sleeper can be debated: it benefited from a savvy Internet campaign that helped stoke the fires.

But “Greek Wedding” was the real thing. “Hollywood had written off the older audience,” said Mr. Berney, who ran IFC Films when it released that movie. “But seniors went to see it 8 or 9 or 10 times. Later it became a date movie for younger audiences. It was about a family that everybody related to.”

Three years later Lionsgate was startled to discover the potency of another neglected audience, African-Americans, who turned out in droves to see “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.”

“The movie wasn’t tracking well,” said Tom Ortenberg, the president for theatrical films at Lionsgate. “That’s because it appealed to a nontraditional movie audience. We thought it might make five or six million dollars on the opening weekend. Instead it made $22 million.”

These days films are far less likely to arrive under the radar. And two of the summer’s success stories offer some insight into the changing dynamic of surprise.

“Little Miss Sunshine,” a Fox Searchlight release that has taken in more than $50 million at the box office, was a genuine discovery at Sundance in January. Its two directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, were veterans of commercials and music videos rather than wunderkinder. So “Little Miss Sunshine” didn’t come into the festival as a hot ticket. But right after the first showing it stood out from the pack.

Several studios plunged into a bidding war, and Fox Searchlight won the auction with an offer of $10.5 million, the highest amount ever paid for a movie at Sundance. Once the studio paid that much, the press for the movie exploded, and its success was pretty much guaranteed. It had an extremely high profile by the time it opened in July.

Another Sundance movie qualifies as a more authentic, if modest, sleeper, because it never generated the same buzz. “The Illusionist,” starring Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Jessica Biel, is a tale of romance, magic and political intrigue in late-19th-century Vienna. Most Sundance hits tend to be gritty contemporary tales, and this movie didn’t fit that mold. “It didn’t catch fire at Sundance,” Mr. Dinerstein admitted.

Michael London, one of the film’s producers, elaborated: “The movie has crowd-pleasing elements, especially the trick ending. Audiences love to be fooled. But those crowd-pleasing elements were at odds with the very nature of Sundance.”

Universal was interested in buying “The Illusionist,” Mr. London said, but the studio could not come to terms with Bob Yari, who had financed the film. “The deal never closed,” Mr. London said. “And so two months later we were a cursed movie.”

The other studios, Mr. Dinerstein said, “all felt it was too challenging to market.” Period films usually have a limited audience. In addition, although the actors were well respected, they were not considered surefire box office draws.

With no offers on the table, Mr. Yari decided to release the film himself. “At first we thought it was crazy,” Mr. London said. “But in a way it doesn’t matter who is distributing a movie if audiences respond to it.”

Mr. Dinerstein chose to open “The Illusionist” the same weekend in August as “Snakes on a Plane,” which turned out to be the opposite of a sleeper. It was a movie that had generated a huge amount of Internet chatter but turned out to be dead on arrival.

“I saw a great opportunity in opening against ‘Snakes on a Plane,’ ” he said. “That movie appealed to a younger male audience, and we were going for women and what I might call a more rarefied audience.

“The counterprogramming worked,” Mr. Dinerstein continued. “A month earlier no one expected anything from our movie. Suddenly I was getting calls asking, ‘Where did this come from?’ ” “The Illusionist” grossed about $25 million in its first month and is still playing.

“There is so much clutter that it’s harder for word of mouth to spread,” Mr. London said. “But that makes it even more rewarding when it does happen.”

Correction: Oct. 15, 2006

An article last Sunday about the disappearance of sleeper hits in Hollywood referred incompletely to the producers of the film “The Illusionist.” In addition to Michael London, the others were Brian Koppelman, David Levien, Bob Yari and Cathy Schulman.

'The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More,' by Chris Anderson - The New York Times - New York Times

Dr. Media says, here's the Times review of Chris Anderson's book , which has be come the latest hot book on predicting the future of the Net. Manly take on the book is a good one, and indeed Anderson has put a number of observations together in a neat bit sized package for the biz book buyer club. The deeper issue of the molecularization of culture into boutique interest groups is, IMO, correct, look at what happened to magazines, this is not a new concept, as the reviewer points out. However, what Anderson," hopes" will happen, and in the long run probably will, won't overcome the short term dislocations. After all the top searches on all engines are still for sexually related content, will human nature change?: Will the Islamists want to speak to the liberals or just yell at them? The virtual is a mirror of the real reality, we human being despoil things where ever we go, but sometimes , it's art, we hope.
So if all movies ever made in all languages are available 24/7 will it really make you a better person, or just give you more stuff to kill time with?

From a business POV, get ready for the endless garage sale.

‘The Long Tail’ Foresees a Marketplace of Pixel-Size Niches

By LORNE MANLY

In May 1985 two British mountain climbers set off to become the first people to climb the west face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. But on the descent, one of the men, Joe Simpson, slipped down an ice cliff on the nearly 21,000-foot mountain, shattering his knee joint on impact; another mishap left him stranded in a crevasse, bereft of food, water and a partner.

Mr. Simpson’s account of his crawl to safety appeared three years later as a book called “Touching the Void.” Well reviewed, it sold only modestly in the United States before suffering the fate of so many books: being pulled from the shelves and relegated into publishing limbo. There it remained for nearly a decade until, as Chris Anderson recounts in “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More,” a new force called Amazon.com intervened.

As another book about a mountain-climbing disaster, “Into Thin Air,” by Jon Krakauer, scaled the best-seller lists, some readers wrote reviews noting the similarities of the two books and urging others to pick up “Touching the Void.” Once they did, Amazon’s software took over, noting the buying patterns and suggesting the same thing.

As more customers took Amazon up on its recommendation, the cycle kept repeating and intensifying, leading to more sales. A docudrama of Mr. Simpson’s ordeal was released in the United States in 2004 to appeal to this rekindled interest, HarperCollins printed a revised paperback, and “Touching the Void” moved on to the best-seller lists.

More than an illustration of the benefits online booksellers and a movie tie-in can provide a book, the “Touching the Void” example demonstrates for Mr. Anderson how a new technology-fueled explosion of choice, guided by human and algorithm-driven filters, is upending the rules that have underpinned the entertainment industries for decades.

“Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service — from DVD’s at the rental-by-mail firm Netflix to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody,” he writes. “People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what’s available at Blockbuster Video and Tower Records. And the more they find, the more they like.” For Mr. Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, blockbusters will matter less in the 21st century as supply blooms. “Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of niches,” he writes. And that, he says, is a good thing.

Mr. Anderson’s publishers at Hyperion are using their Disney-honed promotional prowess to market “The Long Tail” as “the most important business book since Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘‘Tipping Point,’ ” though it is not quite as felicitously written as that blend of science and sociology. At heart “The Long Tail” is a book about economics and carries the PowerPoint trappings of the genre, with its charts and graphs, lapses into business jargon and easily digested rules for success. And Mr. Anderson’s thesis suffers at times from overextending itself; a chapter near the end, with sections about KitchenAid and Lego, feels like a perfunctory attempt to give a more general-interest veneer to a book about entertainment and the news media.

But like “The Tipping Point,” Mr. Anderson’s book does an excellent job of spotting trends and fitting them into an easily accessible theoretical framework that helps explain the changing culture around us.

“The Long Tail” began life in 2004 as an article for Wired after Mr. Anderson found himself blowing a pop quiz in the offices of a digital jukebox company called Ecast. He had badly underestimated what percentage of the 10,000 albums available on the company’s Internet-connected jukeboxes had a track chosen at least once each quarter. The Ecast chief executive said that the figure was 98 percent. The average Wal-Mart, by contrast, carries 4,500 different CD’s and the top 20 albums account for 90 percent of its music revenue.

Mr. Anderson had hit on something. Remove the limitations of bricks-and-mortar retailers — like scarce shelf space, which leads companies to concentrate on the most popular products — and the infrequent sellers or undistributed merchandise suddenly start to acquire more value.

Mr. Anderson cites figures from Rhapsody for December 2005, when the biggest hits were downloaded in droves, but even as the demand fell off for less popular songs, interest was never completely extinguished. In statistics the resulting demand curve is called a “long-tailed distribution,” because the curve’s tail is much longer in relation to the head, which shows the performance of the best-selling products. Nomenclature notwithstanding, companies like Amazon and Netflix saw an opportunity. “The onesies and twosies were still only selling in small numbers,” Mr. Anderson writes, “but there were so, so many of them that in aggregate they added up to a big business.”

Mr. Anderson is not arguing that blockbusters are slumping toward extinction. “Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass,” he writes. “And niche culture will get less obscure.”

This is not a new thought. The atomization of culture has been going on for years. The creation of hundreds of cable television networks has whittled away the dominance of the broadcast networks. Yet the average household watches more television than ever, keeping the profits in the coffers of the entertainment conglomerates. But as Mr. Andersen persuasively argues, continued advances in technology, and the Internet in particular, are beginning to supersize this phenomenon and frighten media moguls to an unprecedented degree. The rise of YouTube, MySpace and the like give a taste of the power amateurs are beginning to wield in the creation of content, out of the control of the current titans.

These upheavals also concern some cultural commentators, who fret that the cracking of the social glue will lead to to a society in which people gravitate only to sources that reinforce their existing biases.

Mr. Anderson is not one of them. “Although the decline of mainstream cultural institutions may result in some people turning to echo chambers of like-minded views,” he writes, “I suspect that over time the power of human curiosity combined with near-infinite access to information will tend to make most people more open-minded, not less.”

WSJ.com - The Undateables

Dr. Media says, this is a good one. Here we see a wonderful example of how the Net is changing intimate behavior, just as the phone and car did in the 20th century. How can you maintain your reputation in an environment where anyone can say anything about anybody, and do so anonymously, or using a pseudonym? Anyone seen don'tdatehim.com, remember that song" It's only just begun", have fun.

PS new growth industry , Personal Reputation Management, or Reputation Management Coaching, cool, it's all spin now!!

The Undateables

The next wave in online dating has singles rating each other -- and one misstep can taint a reputation. When popularity trumps the search for a soulmate

By ELLEN GAMERMAN
September 23, 2006; Page P1

The Internet lets people search billions of Web pages in a fraction of a second and instantaneously tap information around the globe. One thing it couldn't do: Find Brian Wolf a girlfriend.

Mr. Wolf was one of the 25 million Americans who visit online dating sites annually, lured by the industry's promise that there's someone out there for everyone. Four years and three dating sites later, he hadn't found a match. His profile -- which said that he likes to travel and play basketball and is looking for a long-term relationship -- found few takers.

THE NEW RATINGS SYSTEM

• Ellen Gamerman discusses the Undateables¹ in a podcast.

• Watch a video² on the difficulties people encounter at online-dating sites.

• Some tips on how to navigate top dating sites.

"It's like 95% of these girls didn't like me," says the 30-year-old marketing manager for a Chicago-area food manufacturer. "That's not a great feeling."

It's no exaggeration to say that online dating has revolutionized the world of relationships since it took off a decade ago. Now, with growth slowing, sites are looking for new ways to stand out. One increasingly popular strategy: Letting users rate each other, either based on their profiles alone or on the experiences of a first date.

Members of Engage.com³ can review people after one date for politeness and honesty. Consumating.com⁴ users give one another "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" depending on how clever their profiles are. JDate.com⁵ encourages members to talk about their dates on a message board, inviting them to share stories of "best dates, worst dates" as well as "turn-ons, turn-offs."

The result is an emerging caste system, where highly rated daters see a lot of action, and others are deemed undateable. The online romance industry doesn't talk about the folks in the latter category, but they're out there. They're singles with seemingly innocent attributes that are setting off digital flags signaling they're unfit to date, or maybe just slightly less fit than others. A forgetful dater who fails to return an email on Engage.com, for instance, could be branded as rude. Simply living in the wrong ZIP Code can push unlucky members of JDate to the bottom of the queue. Even at sites that haven't adopted a ratings approach, a growing cliquishness, combined with the viral nature of the Web, means an offhand comment to one person can come back to haunt you when you meet someone else just a few weeks later.

This is changing the way some online daters behave. For Sarah Schoomer, it's meant focusing as much on trying to boost her ranking as on searching for a soulmate. After trying other sites that failed to find her a match, Ms. Schoomer thought she'd give Consumating.com a shot. She had attended a party the site's members threw in San Francisco and liked the people she met there -- they reminded her of the creative types she knew as a student at Oberlin College a decade earlier. The site also seemed cooler than others, with its quirky ratings feature and offbeat questions that encourage sardonic responses.

The 32-year-old doctoral student in clinical psychology spent hours filling out her profile, fretting over questions like, "Other than the souls of small children, what do you collect?" (Her answer: high-heeled shoes, books and "ex-lovers.") She posted several photos, including one from a trip to Paris and another which she says captures her bubbly spirit.

But not long after her profile went up, the lines were silent. The site posts each member's popularity score, which changes based on positive comments from other users, and then ranks them accordingly. Ms. Schoomer, who had received few plugs from her fellow Consumaters, was ranked close to 6,000 -- far too low to break into the "Local Hotties" section that highlights top singles.

She tried to get more involved in the site -- not only would she make more friends that way, but she heard that members could boost their popularity and score "points" by sending each other notes. Soon, she was logging eight hours a day on the site, trying to up her score by being more visible in message boards and sending strangers clever notes; her laundry, exercise routine and sleep were suffering.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, she took drastic action: a plea to the site's 20,000 members. "I'm just a little too concerned with my standing," she wrote on one of the message boards, describing how she wanted to bust into the top 500 most popular. Since many Consumating daters expect points to be reciprocated, they doled them out to her liberally, and within days, she'd climbed to number 343. "It's all thanks to you," a grateful Ms. Schoomer later wrote.

Now, her profile pops up on more searches, and she shares more than 100 "tags" -- key words that describe her interests and personality -- with the thousands of other users on the site. She's seen a rise in inquiries from potential friends and suitors, and in one recent week, kissed three guys she met through the site. Her confidence is riding high, she says. "I'm pretty cute."

After coming this far, Ms. Schoomer says she now worries that she could get so caught up in the popularity game that her true match could look right past her -- or vice versa. "It does make me stop before posting something and wonder, 'Am I being authentic, or am I just saying something provocative?' "

Veteran online daters and consultants who help people write their profiles say there are ways to avoid the scourge of undateability. On many sites, recently updated profiles appear higher in search results, so it's a good idea to tinker with them often. Savvy users of AOL's personals service, for instance, make frequent and sometimes gratuitous changes to their listings, switching their favorite hobby, or ideal first date.

Photographs can be a minefield. A picture of yourself surrounded by friends is a big mistake -- one of them could be more attractive than you. Sometimes daters kill their chances with profiles that state the obvious -- people who say they like to go out for dinner or fix a cozy meal at home, for instance, are simply characterizing the eating habits of most Americans.

Others go too far in trying to please: Dating experts say women who talk too much about working out can inadvertently end up sounding like gym rats, and men who overstate their love of golf can lead a woman to believe that they'll never be around on weekends. And woe betide the dater with the smiling mountain biker shot: It's anybody's guess what kind of face is hiding behind those shades.

At its most extreme, of course, the new online dating gossip machine can result in someone being publicly humiliated and branded as a cad. That's what happened to Darren Sherman, a New York JDater whose recent dinner with a woman named Joanne became public after details of their date were posted on blogs and passed around via email. In recordings of alleged voice mails and transcripts of emails, the person identified as Darren Sherman repeatedly asks Joanne to reimburse him for her dinner and wine after she rejected him: "You ate the food, you drank the wine, you know, kindly pay your bill."

Googling his name turns up dozens of links to the story, including one that reads "How Not to Act on J-Date." Peter Shankman, a New York public-relations executive who related the story on his blog, says it received 26,000 page views a day for two weeks this July. "This is what happens when you're not careful," says Mr. Shankman. Efforts to reach Mr. Sherman were unsuccessful, and the emails and voice mails don't give his date's last name.

From top: Brian Wolf says after having no luck on Match.com, he set up his own site to find dates; Sarah Schoomer boosted her popularity on one site by encouraging other members to send her points; Denise Olmos received poor reviews on Engage.com from men she didn't respond to.

The majority of undateables are hardly what most people would consider poor prospects. They're not liars or criminals, but eligible single men and women who are being sidelined by the system. They're hitting the wrong note by listing hobbies that scream shut-in -- fantasy football for men, scrapbooking for women -- or by including shots with their heads obscured by skydiving helmets.

Denise Olmos's first foray into online dating came two years ago, shortly after separating from her husband. The 50-year-old blonde from Draper, Utah, who describes herself as a lapsed Mormon, was persuaded by her children to try out AOL's personals service to help boost her self-esteem after the break up.

Then an email landed in her inbox, an ad for a new site called Engage.com. She liked the look of the site, which includes a "matchmaker" feature for members to set each other up, and a "Promise" section that states: "We passionately believe that there is someone for everyone waiting to give and receive love -- and that means someone for you too."

Ms. Olmos spent a half hour putting together her profile, noting her love of hiking, religion and rock 'n' roll (as manager of her children's alternative rock band, Skarekro, she finds herself at more concerts than most women her age). Ms. Olmos, a former customer service manager, wrote that she was looking for a tall man who was spiritual and could appreciate her love of music and dancing.

One thing she hadn't considered was another of the site's prominent features: a ratings system that judges daters based on politeness, profile accuracy and responsiveness, then ranks them on a scale between one and five. After posting what she hoped would be an alluring photo of her in a tight white outfit lounging by a fireplace, the initial results were promising: Several email inquiries showed up in her inbox.

That's when Ms. Olmos made a crucial mistake that had lingering -- and unexpected -- consequences. Deciding that she wasn't interested in any of the men who had contacted her, she ignored their emails. Then, before she could go on an actual date, her politeness and profile honesty scores dropped to one. As it turns out, it's OK to decline an email on the site, but doing so courteously is important. She suspects that her failure to respond was probably responsible for the ratings drop. "Somebody felt rejected," she says.

Her poor marks are still posted next to her picture. But instead of trying to combat them by emailing back and getting others to give her better reviews, she has simply abandoned Engage. Now she prefers Myspace.com, where she says she has met a lawyer whom she has recently started dating. "You can give anybody you want a low rating" on some sites, she says. "I could have had a million dates, but I'm busy and I pick and choose."

Engage.com spokeswoman Trish McDermott says while some daters may feel bruised by a bad review, the rankings are cumulative, so singles can improve their scores as they continue to date. Ms. McDermott says the majority of daters on the site receive high rankings, and feedback can help singles improve their dating behavior by holding them accountable for their actions online. "On most dating sites your behavior isn't even tracked; there's no consequences for the behavioral choices you make," she says.

Todd Hollis, a 38-year-old Pittsburgh lawyer, says he was filled with hope about a new relationship this past spring when a family member called, directing him to Dontdatehimgirl.com, a site where women post names of men to warn other women off. The site included anonymous allegations that he has a sexually transmitted disease and is a poor dresser (Mr. Hollis denies both).

His first thought when he logged on: Everyone in the city will be able to see this. Later, he told the woman he was dating about the mention; the relationship fizzled. Over the summer, Mr. Hollis says he investigated the sources of the accusation. He is now suing several women who allegedly posted the claims, as well as the owner of the site, Tasha Joseph, for defamation, hoping to claim at least $50,000. Ms. Joseph says she is not legally responsible for the content of posts that others write; she adds that men who are targeted can log on and post a rebuttal.

Mr. Hollis says before he asks women out now he warns them that they might see some unpleasant hits on a Web search of his name. That's not much of an introduction, he says, and it often scares dates away. "It's made me very notorious in the eyes of many women," he says.

Another problem for online daters: overcrowding. With many sites allowing members to post for free -- many charge fees only when daters try to contact each other -- singles can get lost. Julia Gliner, a 28-year-old administrator for a New York City venture capital firm, joined JDate last winter and was confused when she couldn't find her profile anywhere on the site soon after. When she called customer service, she says, she was told her that her Upper West Side ZIP Code was so crowded with single women, it might take days for her picture to emerge.

Ms. Gliner's profile finally appeared a few days later -- she followed the site's advice and logged on repeatedly to show up in the "most active" search -- but by then her confidence had dimmed. "I was thinking, 'Wow, there's a lot of competition out there,'" she says. While she went on some dates, she didn't find a boyfriend and quit after two months.

Gail Laguna, a spokeswoman for Spark Networks, which owns JDate, says the site posts all new profiles within 24 hours, but Ms. Gliner may have missed it initially and, in the following days, the queue could have easily filled to the 500-woman capacity, thus bumping her profile from the standard search. "It's tricky because New York is our biggest market," she says. "You can get lost online as easily as you can offline."

As for Brian Wolf, the Chicago marketing manager, he says the best solution for his undateability was to take matters into his own hands. This spring, he launched Settleforbrian.com. Mr. Wolf says his site is what major online dating services would be if everyone were honest. Though he writes on the site that his nose is big and he doesn't want kids, he also touts his sense of humor and good job: "I'm by no means perfect, but you could also do a lot worse. …In the end, you'd probably be happier with me than chasing the dream of Mr. Right."

The upfront technique appears to be working. So far, Settleforbrian.com has netted more than 86,500 visitors in just over three months. He has received about 600 emails, gone on three dates, and says he's feeling more hopeful about his love life than he ever has before: "I'm going to keep this up until I meet the right girl."

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com⁶

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t - New York Times

Dr. Media says this is cool, and how many times before this gets old. Is it a fake memoir, or merely a smart move to get some attention, who cares if it's true, after all, it's the internet, who knows what is true anyway, remember swiftboating!?




September 13, 2006

Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn’t

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN and TOM ZELLER Jr.

A nearly four-month-old Internet drama in which the cryptic video musings of a fresh-faced teenager became the obsession of millions of devotees — themselves divided over the very authenticity of the videos, or who was behind them or why — appears to be in its final act.

The woman who plays Lonelygirl15 on the video-sharing site YouTube.com has been identified as Jessica Rose, a 20-ish resident of New Zealand and Los Angeles and a graduate of the New York Film Academy. And the whole project appears to be the early serialized version of what eventually will become a movie.

Matt Foremski, the 18-year-old son of Tom Foremski, a reporter for the blog Silicon Valley Watcher, was the first to disinter a trove of photographs of the familiar-looking actress, who portrayed the character named Bree in the videos. The episodes suggested Bree was the home-schooled daughter of strictly religious parents who was able to find the time to upload video blogs of her innermost thoughts.

The discovery and the swift and subsequent revelation of other details surrounding the perpetrators of the videos and the fake fan site that accompanied it are bringing to an end one of the Internet’s more elaborately constructed mysteries. The fans’ disbelief in Lonelygirl15 was not willingly suspended, but rather teased and toyed with. Whether they will embrace the project as a new narrative form, condemn it or simply walk away remains to be seen.

The masterminds of the Lonelygirl15 videos are Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker. The high quality of the videos caused many users to suspect a script and production crew, but Bree’s bedroom scenes were shot in Mr. Flinders’s home, in his actual bedroom, typically using nothing more than a Logitech QuickCam, a Web camera that retails for about $150.

Together with Grant Steinfeld, a software engineer in San Francisco, Mr. Flinders contrived to produce and distribute the videos to pique maximum curiosity about them.

The photographs of the actress, which made it clear that Ms. Rose has been playing Bree in the videos, were cached on Google.

“We were all under N.D.A.’s” Mr. Steinfeld said, referring to non-disclosure agreements the cast — and their friends — were asked to sign to preserve the mystery of Lonelygirl15. “They had a lawyer involved,” he said. “My first impression was like, wow, can this be legitimate? Is this ethical? I was very concerned about that in the beginning.”

But after he came to understand the project, Mr. Steinfeld said, he came to believe that something truly novel was at hand. “They were like the new Marshall McLuhan.”

Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett obscured their location by sending e-mail messages as Bree from various Internet computer addresses, including the address of Creative Artists Agency, the Beverly Hills talent agency where the team is now represented. Amanda Solomon Goodfried, an assistant at the agency, is believed to have helped Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett conceal their identities. Moreover, Ms. Goodfried’s father-in-law, Kenneth Goodfried, a lawyer in Encino, filed to trademark “Lonelygirl15” in August.

The story of how Mr. Flinders, Mr. Beckett and Ms. Rose were discovered in spite of their efforts to hide, and prolong the mystery, sheds light on the nature of online wiki-style investigations and manhunts. When Mr. Steinfeld’s dummy site, which had been set up before the first Lonelygirl15 video was even posted, struck users as suspicious and unsupervised — Mr. Steinfeld says he grew tired of running it, and dropped out of the project — fans set up their own site devoted to Lonelygirl15, which soon attracted more than a thousand members.

Both sites drew contributions from novelists, journalists, academics, day traders, lawyers, bloggers, filmmakers, video game designers, students, housewives, bored youngsters and experts on religion and botany. In the cacophony of conjecture, analysis, close-readings, jokes, insults, and distractions, good information sometimes surfaced.

Last month, a Lonelygirl15 fan discovered and posted a trademark application by Mr. Goodfried, which seemed to prove that the videos, which presented themselves as nothing but a video diary, were at least in part a commercial venture. Then, last week, three tech-savvy fans, working together, set up a sting on the e-mail being used by “Bree”; the operation revealed to them the I.P. address of Creative Artists Agency.

On the strength of this information, Mr. Foremski was confident he could find some trace of Bree on the Internet. He was sure that any participant in a semiprofessional production like Lonelygirl15 would have posted pictures somewhere. Sure enough, they had.

Mr. Steinfeld, on learning that Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett had been found out, offered his photographs of Ms. Rose as proof of his involvement in the Lonelygirl15 videos. He had been hired to take the pictures on the set at the start of shooting.

The series, which Mr. Flinders and Mr. Beckett plan to continue on a site overseen by them, may play differently with fans now that they know for sure that Bree is an actress. Part of the appeal of the series was that the serious-minded, literate Bree offered an unbeatable fantasy: a beautiful girl who techy guys had something in common with.

On learning that Ms. Rose was an actress whose interests, unlike the scientific and religious issues that fascinated Bree, ran to parties and posing, one fan wrote, “Very cute, but she’s really not into Feynmann and Jared Diamond! (I’m heart-broken ...But a wonderful actress, had me fooled into thinking she was a geek like me.)”

You tube data, Gomes from WSJ

Dr. Media. says check out this out some real data on youtube and vid on the net, we think, remember always hard to tell what's real, but Gomes did a good job scraping the site and reporting some University research. The youtube phenomen will have a significant impact on the future of video on the web as will myspace. FYI,
According to May, 2006 data from Hitwise the top five video sites are:

* YouTube: 42.94%
* MySpace Video: 24.22%
* Yahoo! Video Search: 9.58%
* MSN Video Search: 9.21%
* Google Video: 6.48%

If the data from YouTube are to believed, the world has a lot of explaining to do.

The video-sharing site doesn't make public much of the information it has about itself, such as a breakdown of the nationalities of its registered users. But it's possible to piece together that sort of information by "scraping" the site, a popular and entirely legal practice of using a computer to gather methodically all the tiny bits of public information scattered around a Web site, and then piecing them together.

I did a scrape of YouTube a month ago and found there were 5.1 million videos. By Sunday, the end of another scrape, that number had grown by about 20% to 6.1 million. Because we know how many videos have been uploaded to the site, the length of each, and how many times it has been watched (total views were 1.73 billion as of Sunday) we can do a little multiplication to find out how much time has collectively been spent watching them.

We will get to the result in due time. First, some other bits of YouTube fun -- data-crunching style. For example, the words "dance," "love," "music" and "girl" are all exceedingly popular in titles of YouTube videos.

Also, nearly 2,000 videos have "Zidane" in the title. Who at a desk anywhere on the planet didn't watch at least one head-butt video in the days after French soccer star Zinedine Zidane's meltdown in the World Cup final? For all the talk of the Internet fragmenting tastes and interests, YouTube is an example of the Web homogenizing experiences.

YouTube videos take up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage -- about 5,000 home computers' worth -- and require several million dollars' worth of bandwidth a month to transmit.

Those costs are one reason that some predict YouTube will collapse under the sheer weight of providing a haven for every teenager with a cellphone camera eager to be famous for 15 minutes of video.

An even more enterprising YouTube scraper is Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, which, equipped with a supercomputer with 400 nodes and a 10 gigabit Ethernet connection, was able to learn about all of the 500,000 or so people who bothered to create profiles for themselves at the site.

While YouTube's messaging software is rudimentary, and often doesn't work, many users nonetheless rely on it to stay in touch with each other. That gives YouTube -- and other Web locales -- some of the "social network" characteristics usually associated with the likes of MySpace. And it's another reason that established players like Yahoo and Google are ramping up their video-sharing competitors.

Johan Pouwelse, a Delft professor who helped develop a peer-to-peer, video-sharing technology at Delft called Tribler (one that he says could help YouTube cut down on bandwidth costs), reports that 70% of YouTube's registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age.

The oldest active viewer apparently is geriatric1927, a 79-year old U.K. resident who sits at his PC in his study with headphones on and narrates memories of World War II. Ernie Rogers, a 23-year old from Colton, Calif., whose handle is "lamo1234," has watched more YouTube videos than anyone. Mr. Rogers claims he is on the site 24/7. And as "the YouTube rockstar," he has shared his original songs, including one called "Waste of Time."

The most devoted uploader is Christy Leigh Stewart, a 21-year-old college student who lives near Modesto, Calif., and who has so far uploaded nearly 2,000 videos. Nearly all involve Korean pop music, a passion of Ms. Stewart. Indeed, she says the main reason she spends too much time with YouTube is to drive traffic to hwaiting.net, a Korean-oriented Web site she runs with her friend Megan Hansen.

The notion of using the enormous YouTube audience for marketing other products has occurred to many people, including YouTube itself. It recently struck a deal with Paris Hilton, whose "channel," reports Prof. Pouwelse, instantly became the most popular.

Another is Marc Pearson, 24, who, as pearson101, records backyard wrestling matches: enthusiastic but low-budget versions of the fake-real matches you see on cable. Because his hometown of Stoke-on-Trent, England, is short on wrestlers, Mr. Pearson uses YouTube to attract opponents. "We used to have a lot of wrestlers around here, but not anymore, on account of all the injuries," he explains.

The YouTube juggernaut has attracted the interest of many others, including academics. Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School professor with an interest in the digital-entertainment marketplace, said the site is a good laboratory for studying how some forms of content become popular.

Andrew M. Odlyzko, a mathematician who heads the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, has examined YouTube data, such as lists of most-viewed videos, to see whether the numbers follow a pattern familiar to statisticians, where a few of the most popular items get an especially large percentage of the traffic. They do.

Oh yes, I owe you a statistic: The total time the people of the world spent watching YouTube since it started last year. The figure is -- drum roll, please -- 9,305 years!

Dr. Media says, here you go so I guess the net may not be ready for movie primetime afterall, gee shocked aren't we.





August 31, 2006

Basics

Films That Come Over the Net Don’t Come Easy

By JOHN R. QUAIN

Several obstacles — meager libraries, frustrating download times, copyright issues — have hamstrung online movie offerings to date. But the biggest challenge has been what those in the industry refer to as the “last 10 feet” problem. You could download a digital copy of a movie to your computer, but you were stuck watching it on the PC.

The meager libraries are quickly filling up with titles to rent or buy. And several movie sites are even on the verge of bridging those last 10 feet.

There are a variety of ways to obtain movies online — legitimately. One approach from Vongo (www.vongo.com), for example, is a subscription movie rental service. For a monthly $9.99 fee, movie fans can watch any movie on the service on their PC’s. But the selection is limited to titles licensed by the Starz premium cable and satellite service, which owns Vongo. That means that there are typically only a few hundred full-length feature films available at any given time, mostly post-DVD release titles, like “Jackie Brown” and “Bewitched.”

Vongo’s subscription model has two additional drawbacks. You cannot purchase movies to own, and each movie has “available until” restrictions. When Starz’s license to broadcast a movie ends, so does your right to play the downloaded file.

To avoid such confusion, most movie download sites try to mimic the offerings of dwindling brick-and-mortar video stores. Typically, the online rental sites like CinemaNow (www.cinemanow.com) and Movielink (www.movielink.com) offer digitally compressed movies on a pay-per-rental basis. Customers download movies from an online catalog; rentals last for 24 hours, or you can purchase titles to keep.

While the idea sounds simple, carrying it out has been anything but. A digitally compressed movie takes at least 30 minutes to download over a high-speed cable or D.S.L. connection. If you want picture quality comparable to that of a DVD release, it can take more than an hour to download a 90-minute movie. CinemaNow also offers several titles in a crystal-clear high-definition format, but downloading these monster files is an overnight process.

In addition to the lethargic download times, the playback restrictions imposed by studios are reminiscent of the fine print on a car lease. CinemaNow’s typical rental fees for the store’s 1,000-plus library of movies range from $2.99 for older titles to $3.99 for new releases. Offerings include most of the latest major releases, matching those you would find in a video store. You have 30 days from the date of rental to watch a movie, but once you hit the start button you have just 24 hours to watch before the rental self-destructs.

If you want to download a title permanently to your hard drive, prices at CinemaNow are $9.95 to $19.95. The catch is that to adhere to Hollywood’s copyright restrictions these movies can be viewed on only three devices, all compatible with Windows Media Player, that you register with the service. You can make a backup copy of a purchase to a DVD, but that DVD will play only on the computer that was originally used to download the movie. Furthermore, not all rental movies are available for purchase — and not all movies available for purchase are available for rental.

Confused yet? If so, you should be happier with the latest CinemaNow feature, offering movies you can burn to a disc that will play on any DVD player. Intended to solve the “last 10 feet” problem, the burn-to-DVD service is still in preview or “beta” mode, but it already has a selection of over 100 titles, including “Center of the World” by Wayne Wang, the Al Pacino movie “Scent of a Woman,” and concert videos by artists like Johnny Cash and the Doors.

It took me an hour to download the $12.99 offbeat thriller “Panic.” But when it came time to burn the DVD, which CinemaNow’s software does automatically, the recording failed after 30 minutes, wasting one blank DVD. A second attempt, which took about 30 minutes, was successful.

In addition to the time investment, buyers should know that the copy-thwarting software that CinemaNow employs to make the DVD’s is not an industry standard. Consequently, some competitors warn that the discs may not play in all DVD players. But in informal tests with new and old DVD players, I encountered no problems, and the picture quality was comparable to most store-bought DVD’s.

The CinemaNow burn-to-DVD feature is a harbinger of what is to come in the next few months from other services, according to Jim Ramo, the president of Movielink. Movielink offers a similar library of mainstream films with playback restrictions that are virtually identical to those of CinemaNow. Rental prices range from $1.99 to $4.99, with download-to-own prices starting at $8.99 and going up to $19.99. Movielink differs from CinemaNow in that it does not have a section of sexually explicit films, and it offers a handful of titles in a format for new portable media players based on the Windows Ultra-Mobile PC operating system from Microsoft.

Owned by major studios — MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers — Movielink does not yet let customers burn movies to DVD’s, but Mr. Ramo says the studios are eager to do so. Consequently, in a few months Movielink will include a burn-to-DVD option with a copy protection program called the Content Scramble System (CSS), which will require the use of special DVD’s.

Other sites are trying to lure movie fans by adding downloadable Hollywood movies to the type of free amateur clips found on sites like YouTube. Guba (www.guba.com), for example, originally offered only free video clips culled from newsgroup postings but now includes mainstream films like “V for Vendetta” for purchase at $9.99. Twenty-four-hour rentals for older films, like “Rebel Without a Cause,” can be as low as 99 cents, but there is a limited selection (mainly Sony and Warner Brothers titles).

Last week, AOL introduced its own AOL Video portal (www.aolvideo.com), combining free video fare with downloadable movies and a range of TV series, like “Wonder Woman” and “Blue’s Clues.” Backed by AOL’s owner, Time Warner, the site is quickly amassing an extensive arsenal of shows and movies as it signs up more studios and television networks. It already has movies from four Hollywood studios, including 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures, and features ad-supported content from A&E, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and TNT. Like YouTube and Guba, it also includes free amateur videos.

Even AOL’s download service, however, can be confusing for customers trying to figure out what is free and what is available for purchase. For example, “Wonder Woman” episodes can be viewed free as a streaming video feed, while “Blue’s Clues” shows can be downloaded to a PC but cost $1.99 each. Movies, like “Spider-Man 2,” can be bought for $9.99 but not rented or burned to DVD.

In September, AOL will introduce a “10-foot edition” of AOL Video designed to be navigated by remote control on a TV connected to a Windows Media Center PC.

The current online mainstream movie services are for Windows users only. But the superstar in digital downloads is still iTunes from Apple, whose offerings so far are limited to $1.99 TV shows and music videos for playback on iPod screens. Enlarging the picture even to computer monitor size yields a fuzzy image. On the other hand, Apple claims it has sold more than 35 million videos online, so it may not be long before iTunes realizes it has to join the downloadable movie movement.

Ultimately, what may hamper sales of downloadable movies may not be download times or trouble with DVD burning. The obstacle will be price. It is often more economical to rent DVD’s from local rental kiosks or mail-order outfits like Netflix (www.netflix.com). So for now the best way to solve the “last 10 feet” problem is still to get up off the couch.

Precisely False vs. Approximately Right: A Reader’s Guide to Polls - New York Times

Dr Media says, good article, remember this EVERY TIME you read ANY poll report. Whether it's finacial , social, or, especially, Internet projections for ANYTHING, be forewarned. Did you ever wonder how you can get precise, measures for the Net when at least 1/3 of the people on the net lie about everything including and especially their age and sex.???




Precisely False vs. Approximately Right: A Reader’s Guide to Polls - New York Times

August 27, 2006

The Public Editor

Precisely False vs. Approximately Right: A Reader’s Guide to Polls

By JACK ROSENTHAL

LAST March, the American Medical Association reported an alarming rate of binge drinking and unprotected sex among college women during spring break. The report was based on a survey of “a random sample” of 644 women and supplied a scientific-sounding “margin of error of +/– 4.00 percent.” Television, columnists and comedians embraced the racy report. The New York Times did not publish the story, but did include some of the data in a chart.

The sample, it turned out, was not random. It included only women who volunteered to answer questions — and only a quarter of them had actually ever taken a spring break trip. They hardly constituted a reliable cross section, and there is no way to calculate a margin of sampling error for such a “sample.”

The Times published a correction explaining the misrepresentation, and the news media that used the story would probably agree with what Cliff Zukin, a Rutgers authority on polls, told Mystery Pollster, a polling blog: how unfair it is to publish a story “suggesting that college students on spring break are largely drunken sluts.”

The story also threatened larger harm. Its general point was indisputable; vacationing collegians often behave recklessly. But there was a larger recklessness in the misrepresentation of the survey. Now that everyone has a phone and calls are cheap, polling organizations have blossomed, and each such example of bad polls risks undermining public confidence in good ones.

Another example surfaced last week in The Wall Street Journal. It examined a “landmark survey,” conducted for liquor retailers, claiming to show that “millions of kids” buy alcohol online. A random sample? The pollster paid the teenage respondents and included only Internet users.

Such misrepresentations help explain why The Times recently issued a seven-page paper on polling standards for editors and reporters. “Keeping poorly done survey research out of the paper is just as important as getting good survey research into the paper,” the document said.

These standards, coming just as the fall campaign heats up, provide a timely reminder of responsible journalism. But the best of intentions are not always met in practice, at The Times or in other media. The standards do not, for instance, discuss how even a punctilious poll story can be given inflated prominence. There is no reason, in any case, to limit such cautions to journalists. Readers, too, need to know something about polls — at least enough to sniff out good polls from bad. Here’s a brief guide.

False Precision

Beware of decimal places. When a polling story presents data down to tenths of a percentage point, what the pollster almost always demonstrates is not precision but pretension. A recent Zogby Interactive poll, for instance, showed that the candidates for the Senate in Missouri were separated by 3.8 percentage points. Yet the stated margin of sampling error meant the difference between the candidates could be seven points. The survey would have to interview unimaginably many thousands for that zero point eight to be useful.

Experienced researchers offer a rule of thumb: rather than trust improbably precise numbers, round them off. Even better, look for whole fractions.

Sampling Error

The Times and other media accompany poll reports with a box explaining how the random sample was selected and stating the sampling error. Error is actually a misnomer. What this figure actually describes is a range of approximation.

There’s also a formula for calculating the error in comparing one survey with another. For instance, last May, a Times/CBS News survey found that 31 percent of the public approved of President Bush’s performance; in the survey published last Wednesday, the number was 36 percent. Is that a real change? Yes. After adjustment for comparative error, the approval rating has gained by at least one point.

For a typical election sample of 1,000, the error rate is plus or minus three percentage points for each candidate, meaning that a 50-50 race could actually differ by 53 to 47. But the three-point figure applies only to the entire sample. How many of those are likely voters? In the recent Connecticut primary, 40 percent of eligible Democrats voted. Even if a poll identified the likely voters perfectly, there still would be just 400 of them, and the error rate for that number would be plus or minus five points. So to win confidence, a finding would have to exceed 55 to 45.

This caution applies forcefully to conclusions about other subgroups. What could a typical survey tell about, say, college-age women? Out of a random sample of 1,000, a little more than half would be women and only about 70 would be of college age. That’s too small a subsample to support any but the most general findings.

Questions

How questions are phrased can mean wide shifts, even with wholly neutral words. Men respond poorly, for instance, to questions asking if they are “worried” about something, so careful pollsters will ask if they are “concerned.”

The classic “double negative” example came in July 1992, when a Roper poll asked, “Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?” The finding: one of every five Americans seemed to doubt that there was a Holocaust. How much did that startling finding result from the confusing question? In a follow-up survey, Roper asked a clearer question, and the number of doubters plunged from the original 22 percent to 1 percent.

Extreme questions are fine if the poll asks questions at both extremes, says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll and author of “Polling Matters,” an authoritative 2004 book on this subject. The difference between the answers “can give us good insights into evolving social norms,” he says. “All data are interesting.”

In any case, Warren Mitofsky, head of a leading international polling company, observes that “for political surveys, most of the questions have been asked for many years, have been tested and are not the source of error.”

The order of questions is another source of potential error. That’s illustrated by questions asked by the Pew Research Center. Andrew Kohut, its president, says: “If you first ask people what they think about gay marriage, they are opposed. They vent. And if you then ask what they think about civil unions, a majority support that.”

Answers

People never wish to look uninformed and will often answer questions despite ignorance of the subject. Some 40 years into the cold war, many respondents were still saying yes, Russia is a member of NATO. That’s why, says Rob Daves, head of the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers, skillful pollsters will first ask, for new or sophisticated subjects, a scaling question like, How much do you know about this issue: a great deal, some, not at all?

Respondents also want to appear to be good citizens. When the Times/CBS News Poll asks voters if they voted in the 2004 presidential election, 73 percent say yes. Shortly after the election, however, the Census Bureau reported that only 64 percent of the eligible voters actually voted.

Jon Krosnick, an authority on polling and politics at Stanford, uses the term “satisficing” to describe behavior when a pollster calls. If people find the subject compelling, they become engaged. If not, they answer impatiently. Either way, says Kathy Frankovich, director of surveys for CBS News, “people grab the first thing that comes to mind.”

Intensity

How strongly people feel about an issue may be the most important source of poll misunderstanding. In survey after survey, half the respondents favor stronger gun controls — but don’t care nearly as much as the 10 percent who want them relaxed.

Intensity can be measured by asking a scaled question: Is the issue of abortion so important that you will cast your vote because of a candidate’s position? One of several important issues? Not important? Each added question increases the interview length, testing the respondent’s patience and the pollster’s budget. Nevertheless, on divisive issues, responsible pollsters will ask four, five, even a dozen questions, probing for true feelings.

Public opinion is not precise, and in any case it is constantly churning. Measuring it cannot hope to be precise. What readers can hope for, whether in an individual poll, a consensus from several polls or from the polling profession generally, is the truth — approximately right.

Jack Rosenthal, president of The New York Times Company Foundation, was a senior editor of The Times for 26 years. Byron Calame, the public editor, is on vacation.

The YouTube Election - New York Times

Dr Media says the youtube phenom will be that anyone can produce anything to besmirch anyone's reputation at anytime, and all that person ( organization, company, etc.) can do is say it isn't true, and wait for the fall out. Those who are inclined to not believe will say no and those inclined to believe will say yes, and most importantly SPREAD the gossip meme. This is the nature of the web and until the audience for the web develops better radar, anyone can spew whatever bile they so desire, anonymously, this is called, in honor of John Kerry, "swift boating", it's a verb. Ever wonder how many spouse/partner/lover's have been dissed by ex's on the web. or turned in for tax evasion, or rolled over on dope bust, just to get even, now those are stats I'd like to see.




The YouTube Election - New York Times

August 20, 2006

Candidly Speaking

The YouTube Election

By RYAN LIZZA

AUGUST, usually the sleepiest month in politics, has suddenly become raucous, thanks in part to YouTube, the vast videosharing Web site.

Last week, Senator George Allen, the Virginia Republican, was caught on tape at a campaign event twice calling a college student of Indian descent a “macaca,” an obscure racial slur.

The student, working for the opposing campaign, taped the comments, and the video quickly appeared on YouTube, where it rocketed to the top of the site’s most-viewed list. It then bounced from the Web to the front page of The Washington Post to cable and network television news shows. Despite two public apologies by Senator Allen, and his aides’ quick explanations for how the strange word tumbled out, political analysts rushed to downgrade Mr. Allen’s stock as a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

YouTube’s bite also hurt Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, who was defeated by the political upstart Ned Lamont in Connecticut’s Democratic primary earlier this month. In that contest, pro-Lamont bloggers frequently posted flattering interviews with their candidate on YouTube and unflattering video of Senator Lieberman. The Lamont campaign even hired a staffer, Tim Tagaris, to coordinate the activities of the bloggers and video bloggers.

In the real world, of course, neither Senator Lieberman nor Senator Allen is finished. Senator Lieberman, running as an independent, leads in recent polls. And Senator Allen, who said that he had meant no insult and that he did not know what macaca meant, is favored to win re-election against his Democratic opponent, James Webb. But the experience serves as a warning to politicians: Beware, the next stupid thing you say may be on YouTube.

When politicians say inappropriate things, many voters will want to know. Now they can see it for themselves on the Web.

But YouTube may be changing the political process in more profound ways, for good and perhaps not for the better, according to strategists in both parties. If campaigns resemble reality television, where any moment of a candidate’s life can be captured on film and posted on the Web, will the last shreds of authenticity be stripped from our public officials? Will candidates be pushed further into a scripted bubble? In short, will YouTube democratize politics, or destroy it?

YouTube didn’t even exist until 2005, but it now attracts some 20 million different visitors a month. In statements to the press, the company has been quick to take credit for radically altering the political ecosystem by opening up elections, allowing lesser known candidates to have a platform.

Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. “It will favor a kind of authenticity and directness and honesty that is frankly going to be good,” said Carter Eskew, a media consultant who worked for Senator Lieberman’s primary campaign. “People will say what they really think rather than what they think people want to hear.”

But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity.

“Politicians can’t experiment with messages,” Mr. Dowd said. “They can’t get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee.”

He sees a future where candidates must be camera-ready before they hit the road, rather than be a work in progress. “What’s happened is that politicians now have to be perfect from Day 1,” he said. “It’s taken some richness out of the political discourse.”

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees.

“It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time,” Mr. Wolfson said. “You can’t get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won’t get out.”

These rules have long applied to White House contenders, but the dynamic is getting stronger and moving down the ballot. “It used to be the kind of thing that was only true for presidents,” Mr. Wolfson said. “Now with the proliferation of technology it is increasingly true for many other politicians.”

But Mr. Wolfson, who recently led an effort by the Clinton camp to reach out to liberal bloggers hostile to his boss, believes that this trend has one advantage. “It does create more accountability and more democratization of information in the process,” he said.

The explosion of instant video may also put pressure on the news media. In the old days, the Allen video would not have been available for all to see. “Imagine this happened 10 years ago,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We had video and trackers then. But you had to get it to a TV station or newspaper. You had to persuade them to run a story on it. This allows you to avoid the middleman.”

And by doing so, avoid an arbiter, however flawed, of standards. “There’s no, ‘Is this the right thing for political discourse?’ ” Mr. Dowd said. “It’s just there.”

These days journalists are concerned not just about being cut out, but about being part of the show. Reporters often suffer the wrath of bloggers in the same way politicians do. At a recent conference of political bloggers in Las Vegas, reporters more than once reminded one another to be discreet in their conversations because anything overheard was fair game for bloggers to post.

Now, as the campaign trail turns into a 24-hour live set, members of the press corps may find themselves starring on YouTube. “At least one big-time journalist will have their career or life ruined because some element of their behavior that was heretofore private will be exposed publicly,” predicted a senior adviser to a potential 2008 presidential candidate. The adviser requested that his name not be used because he did not want his personal views to be taken for his boss’s.

Then again, YouTube’s impact on politics may be exaggerated. For one, the site’s users are generally young and not highly engaged politically.

“Most social networking sites cater to younger audiences, 18 to 24,” says Michael Bassik, vice president of Internet advertising at MSHC Partners, which advises candidates on media strategies. “For the most part, it’s not political conversations taking place there.”

And maybe the Allen video wasn’t all that shocking after all.

Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog and an Internet consultant to The New York Times Company, doesn’t think all that much has changed.

“Is it news that politicians say stupid things?” he asks. “Of course not.”

It May Be a Long Time

Dr. Media says read this, and listen, Gomes counters the post 90's web fantasy of Anderson, (hate to step on anyones toes) , but his data makes sense. Keep your hands on your wallet. Counterpoint 2, the 80- 20 rule always works in media, online gaming has not grown to the vast proportions hoped, things get old faster on the web, take porn, an endless stream is needed, tell me, what can possbly be new, afterall, you always know the end of that movie.

Gomes' point is well taken.

It May Be a Long Time
Before the Long Tail
Is Wagging the Web
July 26, 2006; Page B1

Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson's hot, new best seller, "The Long Tail," is causing a sensation with its eye-opening claims about the way the Web is rewriting the rules of commerce. But I've looked at some of the same data, and some more of my own, and I don't think things are changing as much as he does.

The book argues that while traditional companies are limited by shelf space to offering only a relatively small number of "hits," on the Web, they can carry a vastly bigger number of slower-selling items. These "misses," which make up the "tail" of the title, can, he says, add up to a big number -- maybe even bigger than sales of the hits.

That would be very different from the business world we know today; no wonder the book's cover promises "The New Economics of Culture and Commerce."

¹ ANDERSON'S REBUTTAL

Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson responds² on his blog.

JOIN A DISCUSSION

What do you think? Is the "long tail" a big driver of business? Join a discussion³

Let's start this discussion where Mr. Anderson starts his book, with his discovery of what he calls a paradigm-changing statistic. In the introduction, he tells how he learns from Ecast, a music-streaming company, that 98% of its catalog gets played at least once a quarter -- much more than most would predict.

This "98 Percent Rule," as Mr. Anderson names it, suggests the remarkable prospect that no matter how much inventory you put online, someone, somewhere will show up to buy it. He writes, "Everywhere I looked the story was the same. ... The 98 Percent Rule turned out to be nearly universal."

Except it's not. Ecast told me that now, with a much bigger inventory than when Mr. Anderson spoke to them two years ago, the quarterly no-play rate has risen from 2% to 12%. March data for the 1.1 million songs of Rhapsody, another streamer, shows a 22% no-play rate; another 19% got just one or two plays.

Mr. Anderson told me in an email that he only mentioned the 98 Percent Rule to show how he first got interested in the book's overall subject, adding, "I have no idea how broadly it applies today."

In the book's main sections, Mr. Anderson writes that as things move online, sales of misses will increase -- so much so that they can equal or exceed the sales of hits. The latter is the book's showstopper proposition; it's mentioned twice on the book's jacket.

I was thus a little surprised when Mr. Anderson told me that he didn't have any examples of this actually occurring. At Netflix and Amazon, two of his biggest case studies, misses won't outsell hits for at least another decade, he said. None of these qualifications are in the book.

Mr. Anderson told me the lack of an example of misses outselling hits doesn't diminish his basic point, which he said is simply that the role of the tail "is big and getting bigger."

By Mr. Anderson's calculation, 25% of Amazon's sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can't find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers -- an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn't meaningful -- you can show that 2.7% of Amazon's titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive.

Another theme of the book is that "hits are starting to rule less." But when I looked online, I was surprised to see what seemed like the opposite. Ecast says 10% of its songs account for roughly 90% of its streams; monthly data from Rhapsody showed the top 10% songs getting 86% of streams.

Bloglines, the widely used blog-reading tool, lists 1.2 million blogs; real ones, not computer-generated "spam blogs." The top 10% of feeds grab 88% of all subscriptions. And 35% have no current subscribers at all -- there's clearly no 98 Percent Rule in the blogosphere.

At Apple's iTunes, one person who has seen the data -- which Apple doesn't disclose -- said sales "closely track Billboard. It's a hits business. The data tend to refute 'The Long Tail.' "

Other economists, of course, are looking into these same questions, though some seem to be reaching far more restrained conclusions. Harvard's Anita Elberse, whom Mr. Anderson said was a consultant during his two-year research project, studies the video sales market, both online and off.

She said in an email that her work to date shows a "slight shift" toward the tail. But she also noted "a rapidly increasing number of titles that never, or very rarely, sell," which suggests "it is difficult for content providers to profit from the 'tail.' "

It would be wonderful if the world as Mr. Anderson describes it were true: one where "healthy niche products" and even "outright misses" collectively could stand their ground with the culture's increasingly soulless "hits."

But while every singer-songwriter dreams from his bedroom of making a living off iTunes, few actually do, mostly because so many others have the very same idea. And to the extent that Apple is making money off iTunes, thanks go to Nelly Furtado and other hitmakers. Indeed, you can make the case that the Internet is amplifying the role of hits, even in relation to misses, not diminishing them.

So maybe Mr. Anderson really has unlocked the sort of new business rules the cover promises. I say we wait before ripping up any business plans. Let's see how the tail shakes out.

Broadband growth drives global online advertising and access spending to more than $260 billion by 2010

Broadband growth drives global online advertising and access spending to more than $260 billion by 2010
Dr. Media says, the latest from PWC, nice growth curve, huh!?

Broadband growth drives global online advertising and access spending to more than $260 billion by 2010

Posted on Aug. 07, 2006

By Kara Hartig

An increasingly competitive market and substantial investment in infrastructure will fuel expansion of broadband, boosting worldwide Internet advertising and access revenues to $265.6 billion in 2010 at a 12.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), according to PricewaterhouseCoopers"' Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2006–2010.

The Outlook defines the Internet advertising and access market as fees consumers pay to Internet service providers as well as online advertisers"' spending on display, classified, and paid search advertising. The market further includes spending on classified advertising from newspaper Web sites.

Asia Pacific will both grow the fastest and claim the largest spending in 2010, expanding to $110.3 billion at a 17.9% CAGR. Rising at a relatively moderate 11% CAGR to $83.4 billion in 2010, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) will lose its global lead to Asia Pacific in 2006, maintaining the second-largest position going forward. With $60.2 billion in revenues in 2010, the U.S. will represent the third-largest market, expanding at an 8.4% CAGR. Although the market in Latin America will remain small at $8.6 billion in 2010, it will boast the second-fastest regional growth of 14.6% compounded annually. With the smallest regional spending, Canada will increase at a modest 9% CAGR to $3.1 billion in 2010.

In the U.S., competition between phone and cable companies has resulted in decreasing prices and increasing speeds for broadband. These drivers, combined with desire to access high-speed applications (e.g., music, video games, movies), will boost near-term growth of broadband penetration, reaching 61.7% in 2010. Moreover, introduction of new delivery methods will continue to expand broadband"'s reach and encourage subscriber growth in the long term, with category spending reaching $30.8 billion in 2010 at a 9.6% CAGR. Although this expansion will adversely affect the dial-up market (declining to $3.8 billion in 2010 at 14.1% compounded annually), overall access spending will rise to $34.7 billion in 2010 at a 4.6% CAGR.

Online advertising revenues will also benefit from broadband expansion. Because broadband subscribers spend relatively more time online and high speeds facilitate new ad formats, mainstream advertisers will increase their online spending. Showing the fastest regional CAGR--15.2%--online advertising will make a major contribution to the overall market at $25.5 billion in 2010.

In EMEA, investment in infrastructure will facilitate reach, and government initiatives to update regulatory structure will stimulate competition and price declines. The resulting rise in total penetration to 57.6% in 2010 will boost overall access spending to $68.5 billion in 2010 at a 9.3% CAGR. With the broadband market primarily benefiting from overall drivers--mainly availability of triple-play packages and decreased prices--dial-up spending will decrease to $9.4 billion in 2010 at a decrease of 7.6% compounded annually. However, broadband"'s expansion to $56.7 billion in 2010 at a 14.7% CAGR will offset dial-up"'s loss, and further attract advertisers. Combined with increased spending on paid search, online advertising will climb to $14.9 billion in 2010 at a 21.2% CAGR.

In 2010, Western Europe will claim the largest spending, rising to $66.1 billion at a 9.9% CAGR. Growing the fastest, Central and Eastern Europe will reach $14.6 billion in 2010 at a 17.1% CAGR. By country, the U.K. will boast the largest market with $16.1 billion in 2010, expanding at a 13.4% CAGR. Germany ($14.1 billion) and France ($9.2 billion) will follow with respective growth of 10.3% and 10% compounded annually. Meanwhile, Russia will represent the fourth-largest market, expanding the fastest at an 18.6% CAGR to $9 billion in 2010.

In Asia Pacific, deregulation of the industry, combined with substantial development of infrastructure, will drive access spending from $44.7 billion in 2005 to $100.4 billion in 2010 at a 17.6% CAGR. By category, broadband will continue its worldwide lead, representing the majority of regional contribution. Fueled by government initiatives and carriers"' investment, the sector will reach $86.8 billion in 2010 at a 21.3% CAGR. Rapid expansion of broadband will further contribute to growth of online advertising, rising at a 21.7% CAGR to $9.9 billion in 2010. Although increasing at a relatively moderate 3.2% CAGR to $13.7 billion in 2010, dial-up will further advance the market.

The People"'s Republic of China (PRC) will primarily fuel global spending dominance of Asia Pacific. Accounting for 81% of regional growth during the forecast period, PRC spending will climb to $73.5 billion in 2010 at a 25.4% CAGR. With the second-largest spending, Japan will contribute $16.7 billion in 2010, followed by South Korea at $8.6 billion.

In Latin America, dial-up will continue to make the predominant contribution to the market, increasing to $4.5 billion in 2010 at an 8.5% CAGR. However, an improving economy has finally made broadband available in most countries, resulting in the sector"'s swift rise at a 24.9% CAGR to $3.6 billion in 2010. Broadband growth will also fuel increased spending on online advertising, rising to $512 million in 2010 at a 23.1% CAGR. Additionally, foreign and domestic investors"' development of infrastructure will boost landline penetration and further encourage overall subscribership, driving total access spending (96% of the regional market) to $8.1 billion in 2010 at a 14.2% CAGR.

By country, Brazil will have the largest market, reaching $3.9 billion in 2010 at a 14.7% CAGR. Argentina and Mexico will contribute the next-largest spending at $1.8 billion apiece, with respective growth of 13.2% and 17.3% compounded annually.

In Canada, competition between cable and phone companies, combined with increasing speeds, will drive the broadband market, reaching $2.2 billion in 2010 at a 10.2% CAGR. Broadband expansion will also boost online advertising, rising at an 18.8% CAGR to $821 million in 2010. Because market maturity will slow overall subscriber growth, overall access spending will rise at a relatively moderate 6.4% CAGR to $2.3 billion in 2010.