It’s finale week on American Idol and I’ve had the chance to chat with one of the biggest American Idol sites out there. Exclusive Interview after the cut.Tomorrow night David Cook takes on David Archuleta for the title of American Idol. As the votes come pouring in on Tuesday night following the performance episode of the singing contest, Jim Hellreigel’s voting software will be hard at work, trying predict some clear results nearly 24 hours before the results show airs.
Dialidol.com was started during season for by Jim as a hobby. Jim is a 32 year old self proclaimed “computer geek” from Cleveland, Ohio and makes his living working in the computer field for a large financial institution. He started the DialIdol software during season four as a means to keep up with chores! He claims, “I had laundry to do and couldn’t justify blowing it off to vote for a TV show so instead I decided to automate the dialing process. I threw “measuring the busy signal” in on a whim and never imagined that the “light bulb moment” I had while doing the laundry would become as popular as it has!
From Dialidol’s website, It’s described as doing the following:
DialIdol measures the busy signal to determine which Idols are getting the most votes – based on the results it can automatically direct your votes to one of your favorite Idols – but not necessarily your favorite.
DialIdol assumes that because one Idols phone line is busier than another’s that they are getting more votes. As a result we predict who will be voted off every week.
Although it can not provide definite results, as it only monitors those lines connected to it’s software, and doesn’t account for most cell phones or any text voting, the site continues to have a high success rate and has successfully predicted the winner of the last 3 finales. (the only three since it’s initial run.) It’s credibility has made the site that much bigger as myself and sites like these feature the results week in and week out as a topic of discussion for the day leading up to the results show.
StarzLife: Why do you think that your site’s numbers have such a successful return rate when they do not count texts, cell lines, or other land lines that aren’t running the DI software. How do you factor those out when you’re dealing with some 29 million votes give or take?
Jim Hellreigel: DialIdol measures land line busy signals and I would bet that most voting occurs via this method. It can measure cell phone usage to a certain extent because it is on the telecomm network but not to the same degree that land lines are measured. People may be more reluctant to use their cell phones because it is typically a more expensive vote. Text messages are not accounted for at all in DialIdol’s predictions but since they are limited to one carrier and since they can be very costly I imagine the volume of text votes is smaller by comparison.
At the end of the vote though I feel like DialIdol has a great sense of how America voted and no matter what method they choose – the patterns probably hold true.
SL: The single results from Utah for this past week show David Cook with a higher score but David Archuleta with more busy signals, and more votes, So who wins Utah? the site suggests Cook, but the numbers don’t match up like the other states.
JH: As with the rest of the site, only trust the percentages. DialIdol bases all of its predictions on percentages and wouldn’t be accurate if it based its predictions on raw numbers. If you dive deep into the nature of DialIdol, which in a nutshell is to vote for the one of your many favorites in the most danger of being voted off, you begin to realize why you can only trust the percentages. Last week is an example of this. David Cook was winning Utah big but DialIdol visitors saw that David Archuleta wasn’t doing as well as David Cook so they probably threw more of their phone calls to him because David Cook was doing well with people who have never heard of DialIdol before. So DialIdol dialers may have skewed the raw numbers in favor of David Archuleta while the whole state of Utah was voting for David Cook.
Last weeks Dialidol results showed a strong and commanding lead for David Cook as shown below, I asked Jim how he thought those results would factor into the following week.
SL: How close will next week be? If the results stay the same , It would mean David A has to pick up about 85% of Syeshas votes to overtake David C
JH: One thing about using the phone system to vote is that it helps to balance out landslides. If the phone system can only handle 1,000,000 calls per contestant and 10,000,000 calls are placed for David Cook to 5,000,000 for David Archuleta then you end up with a much closer tally than the attempted calls suggests. In this scenario I would suspect that David Cook wins – but with a much smaller margin than should be.
That caveat aside, I think this is still going to be the tightest race since season four (Carrie Underwood vs. Bo Bice) and I also think a lot will come down to the performances Tuesday night.
SL: Tivo claims they can predict the loser by monitoring people replaying songs from their favorite contestant and fast forwarding over their least. They use the claim that they’ve got it right for the past 4 weeks, although the last 4 weeks have been almost predictable. Do you think think they have something there even though they offer no numbers or formulas?
JH: I am sure there is some merit to the system Tivo has developed and I admire their creativity. I imagine that there will be times when Tivo is more susceptible to being less accurate if people fast forward or rewind to see contestants flub the lyrics or restart the song. I’d also like to see their predictions before I comment any further.
SL: Who is the next American Idol?
JH: DialIdol won’t make that prediction final until the sunrises on Wednesday morning but one thing is for sure – David is going to win!
So while Dialidol provides us with chit-chat on Wednesday mornings, it’s credible chit-chat. As they disclaim on their website, “these predictions are not scientific. Use these predictions at your own risk. I wouldn’t bet on the predictions.” But the level of successful picks almost makes you want to doesn’t it?
Check back with Starzlife on Wednesday morning for full American Idol coverage, or visit Dialidol at www.dialidol.com to view the final predictions.
Thank you to Jim Hellreigel for taking the time to answer these questions.
Oh and BTW, Executive Producer Nigel Lythgoe has promised a special unnamed guest for the finale. He would not crack on releasing the name but he said it’s “The biggest star in the world.” Who could that be?
photo via: americanidol.com
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