Once upon a time, the Infonaut tried to imagine what the space between all the ones and zeroes was about. Was there any truth to fuzzy logic, a possibility that binary theory allows for some wiggle room? Is there a space between “on” and “off”? The problem proved to be unhealthily dizzying and the puzzle was shelved. Until this month’s New Yorker arrived. Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on Epagogix, “the Formula,” reads vaguely like a Bruce Sterling short story, except apparently it’s non fiction. In an effort to successfully predict the box office outcome of studio fodder, a group of entertainment attorneys, headed up by Dick Copaken, have tapped the deep depths of risk assessment modeling to create the unthinkable - a formulaic, scientific model for predicting a script’s potential as a blockbuster. Factoring in bizarre, yet apparently salient details such as wardrobe, opening scene visuals and semantics, “the formula” is apparently hitting the mark with a suprising level of accuracy. Part marketing, part digital voodoo, and part outright absurdity, the company seems to be making its mark by running scripts through a neural network with a high degree of success. Does this help create better content? Decidedly not. It simply predicts, through the collective history of millions of statistics, the probability that one script is a better bet than another. Deal or no deal?

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I’m glad this is happening — as Jeff Jarvis points out, “new” and “old’ media will live happily ever after. For PR specialists, this especially exciting for the social media-obsessed, who now have plenty of evidence that bloggers and traditional journalists need each other more and more in an a world where knowledge is increasingly networked and “distributed journalism” is slowly becoming the norm.

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I hope this book has a shelf life longer than one week. Thanks to Joseph Mailander for the tip. I always wonder how books like this will fare, since the print cycle often outdates the content. Sometimes it works. My copies of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the Tipping Point are still getting dogeared today.

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Time Magazine, Hoping to Gain Readers, Shifts to Friday - New York Times

Time Magazine has finally announced what most of us already realize — the time to issue a print magazine is on Fridays, not Mondays, as Time has been doing for years. With the conversion to the 24 hour news cycle thoroughly entrenched in the way we process information, the print news magazine is almost irrelevant unless it can provide substantial analysis. The weekends are now the only time working Americans have to process any bits of information not on a screen.

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Little Green Footballs’ Charles Johnson stands out as this week’s super blogger. Not only did this eccentric blogger stand up to Reuters, but he brought them accountable for this photo, which was tipped off as a fake by a tipster and readerof his blog. Freelancer Adnan Hajj had added a LOT more smoke to the fire, with the help of Photoshop, adding a layer of conflict that really didn’t happen. The story hit other mainstream outlets like USA Today today and is an encouraging moment in the evolution of how professional journalism works, how it’s defined and how it’s policed.

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Current TV is offering $100,000 (a nice and hefty prize), along with $10,000 for two runners up in their “Seeds of Tolerance” campaign. The call to action is this: make a video about tolerance – any form of intolerance and celebrity judges Magaret Cho, Paul Haggis, Melissa Etheridge and Edward Norton will call the winner(s). Not a bad deal, considering the tools to make videos have become pretty accessible and low cost.

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