“Meet the new boss; same as the old boss”

NYTimes: Hulu Questions Nielsen’s Count of Its Audience

“Web publishers are never entirely happy with the online ratings they receive from measurement companies. Their internal numbers, collected via clicks to their servers, are almost always higher than the third-party estimates. But the third-party figures act as the currency for promoting sites and selling ads, making them the lifeblood of the industry.”

“It is a pivotal time for Hulu. Analysts say the site has struggled to sell out its advertising inventory amid the rapid gains in traffic. Visitors often see public service announcements in place of paid advertisements when they watch episodes and short clips.”

RRW: Stats Need Standards

“The real problem here, of course, isn’t even about knowing exactly how many people watched videos on Hulu last month (even though we have to admit that this discussion is quite interesting in its own right). Instead, this kerfuffle once again shows how hard it is to correctly estimate usage numbers on the web, especially in the absence of any real standards. As every blogger can easily attest, three different stats programs will give you three different numbers.”

While the IAB issued Audience Reach Measurement Guidelines to try and settle the panel-centric versus server-centric measurement debate, it occurs to me as pointless. It is just elaborate and expensive game of advertising and measuring advertising. It is an endless game of hide and seek that will hopefully, one day, drive them all mad.

So, where does user-centric fit into this conversation? Maybe it is time for a fresh approach? I’m spending some time with Doc Searls’ ideas about the Intention Economy:

Is “The Attention Economy” just another way for advertisers to skewer eyeballs? And why build an economy around Attention, when Intention is where the money comes from?

A random, well-timed twitter search tonight turned up a pleasant surprise: Nobody Move, a new novel from Denis Johnson. The links stacked up nicely with reviews in The Washington Post, SFGate and The Daily Beast and one worth reading:

The Way of the Gun: NYT Sunday Book Review

Johnson is one of the last of the hard-core American realist writers, working — in his own way — along a line that might be charted from Melville and Stephen Crane, with a detour through Flannery O’Connor and Don DeLillo. He routinely explores the nature of crime — all his novels have it in one form or an­other — in relation to the nature of grace (yes, grace) and the wider historical and cosmic order.

The Book Design Review gives you a peek under the dust jacket. I also turned up a Lannan Foundation reading and conversation with Johnson from a couple of years ago and an upcoming Summer Writers’ Conference at USC featuring the man himself on Saturday, June 27, 2009. It looks like you can go to the reading without having to suffer through the whole conference.

The very fantastic Stop Smiling pointed me to the Financial Times article by director Alex Cox on his spaghetti western obsession. I haven’t been exposed to much of the genre beyond Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but I do often fall under the influence of the music.

Yet the real find was wedged into the end of the article that he is working on ‘Repo Chick’, a sequel to ‘Repo Man’. I found more details at We Are Movie Geeks along with Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday, a graphic novel that explains what happened to Otto. There is even more at Alex Cox’s Blog.

I am a big fan of Alex Cox’s movies. Especially ‘Repo Man’. The movie along with my bootleg cassette of the soundtrack became a teenage obsession and still one of my all time favorites. Over the years I’ve found it easily quotable and a fine reference point to a Los Angeles I ended up in 20 years later.