Slashdot Mirror
New Tool Tracks Online Media Consumption
Carl Bialik writes "Technology and market research company BigChampagne is introducing a measurement tool called BCDash to let media companies quickly track how people -- legally or illegally -- use their products online. BigChampagne said BCDash will bring together data from AOL, Yahoo Music, iTunes, and Wal-Mart, along with estimates of illegal file sharing activity for specific titles. It's meant as a marketing tool, the WSJ reports: 'Media companies have often been caught flat-footed when a video or song takes off online. By the time they try to capitalize on it, the opportunity often has passed.'"
along with estimates of illegal file sharing activity for specific titles.
And how pray tell will you acheive this?
Root kits that phone home? IP logs from torrent sites? Or a magic 8ball? Or perhaps the good old fashioned dartboard?
Hrmm... Either they are commiting questionable practices or they are pulling magic numbers out of places where the sun don't shine.
I tend to think it will be the latter since it will be cheaper and no one who buys their service will be able to prove them wrong.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So, how are they going to come up with those estimates of illegal file sharing. And how can I best skew their data? I wonder if I could get all slash-dotters to go along with a massive download of Milli Vanilli songs just to throw them off?
My issue is that if you want to track my habits, track my purchases, my downloads, etc, then make the data available to me as well.
It'd be great to see a geographic breakdown of where my friend's band is most popular. It'd be fairly novel to see musical trends e.g. a resurgance of raggae downloads in Brooklyn.
If you're going to track my data, at least make the results available to me as well.
--
Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/
BCCrash, the program that eliminates BCDash's tracking capabilities.