Technically Incorrect

I've always been a little suspicious of the Scout movement.

The uniforms. The slightly too correct and frightfully ancient hairstyles of some of the senior members. The Scout Promise that gets boys to promise: "To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight." And gets every girl to declare she will: "respect myself and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and be a sister to every Girl Scout."

Now these strangely clothed beings have gone a little too far. They have trampled upon Wild Freeborn.

Wild Freeborn is not some secluded territory in the depths of North Carolina. Wild Freeborn is an 8-year-old Girl Scout from the depths of North Carolina.

Her task in these economically difficult times was to sell 12,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies. Enough, surely, to cause a significant depletion in the population of North Carolina. But let's not inflate that.

Because Wild Freeborn decided to use a little wild, free enterprise. She went to her Dad--no, not Axl, but Bryan--and asked him to help her achieve this monstrous goal. Bryan is a Web designer. Bryan loves his daughter.

So her helped her make a YouTube video in which she coined the memorable line: "Buy cookies--they're yummy."

She sold 700 boxes (at $3.50 each, in case you were wondering).

Creating tomorrow? Tomorrow being 1962, perhaps.

(Credit: CC Aka Kath)

Of course, there was just one tiny, strangely dressed problem: The Girl Scouts of the USA. Specifically, the fact that the group bans Internet sales.

A representative for the Girl Scouts, Denise Pesich, told NBC's "Today" show: "We want to make sure that whatever the girl is doing is integrated into the program that she's studying. We want to make sure we are in the development stages of a technological platform that will integrate it and be fair and equitable for all girls. But more importantly, it's girl safety at its core."

Pesich acknowledged that she had no fears for Wild's safety because her father was overseeing her effort but insisted she couldn't guarantee it would be the same with all children.

Haven't you ever seen little girls selling cookies with no adults in sight? I certainly have.

Bryan Freeborn believes he and Wild were doing nothing wrong as they were limiting their orders to buyers in their immediate area, so that they could deliver them personally.

"The whole intent was to help my daughter meet her goals, utilizing up-to-date marketing principles," he told the morally straight Matt Lauer of NBC.

But up-to-date is surely not a phrase one could readily attach to all of these scouty people. So now Wild Freeborn is faced with having to sell 12,000 boxes of cookies the old-fashioned way: standing outside supermarkets, staying physically strong, remaining mentally awake, and annoying people into submission. Can this really be "using resources wisely"?

Suddenly, I have decided to give up cookies for Lent. Except Google's, of course. Everyone loves Google's.

Welcome to the Year of Fear. They say 2009 will be difficult, dangerous, maybe even disastrous. But, here at Technically Incorrect, we believe it will be the year that the seemingly impossible will be the most likely to happen.

So here are 6 things that we feel sure will occur in 2009. Notice the vital importance of advertising in each of these surefire occurrences.

1. FACEBOOK WILL BE SOLD TO A NETWORK TV STATION. Oh, guffaw away if you must. But some time this year the folks at Facebook will sit down and realize that they haven't sold much advertising. Again. They will look around, from beanbag to beanbag, at the faces in the room and realize that TV stations are still somehow selling ad space. Best bet to pick up this bottle-fed (no teat showing, as per Facebook rules) baby will be NBC. I mean, if you can sell the Olympics on the basis of NOT showing it live, then you really are the magicians of ad sales.

2. HULU WILL START ITS OWN PORN SITE. I think I read somewhere that hotels make most of their money from porn channels. You know, sad, lonely men hanging around in hotel rooms with nothing better to do than hang around. Hulu will get in on this market. Naturally, the biggest difficulty will be selling advertising around this channel. However, NBC is a major player in Hulu. See Prediction No.1 for details of the network's phenomenal advertising sales skills.

(Credit: CC Mosieur J)

3. GOOGLE WILL BUY TWITTER. Because Google is so committed to privacy, deeply, deeply committed, it will buy Twitter. No, not so that you can merely follow someone around, very privately. No, it's so that you can very privately keep up with other people's Google searches in real time. Mark my words, this is the next growth area. People watching people searching. Very privately. And just think of the advertising opportunities. Ads beamed to you in real time reflecting your real up-to-the-minute moods and feelings. And the moods and feelings of everyone you're following. Cool, huh?

4. YOUTUBE WILL LAUNCH ITS OWN CABLE CHANNEL. You know, it's not always easy to find the videos you really want to see on YouTube. If you look at what people are watching most, it often seems to be soccer matches from Poland or Turkey. So YouTube will launch a cable channel, probably in partnership with hitherto advertising-free HBO, that will feature the finest new uploads: the plaintive Britney fans, the strange college sportscasters, the scorned theatrical wives. It will be like America's Funniest Videos but will last for 24 hours each day. Advertisers will, naturally, flock to this surefire hit.

5. ADVERTISING AGENCIES WILL LAY OFF ALL CREATIVE STAFF AND PRODUCE ADS BY ALGORITHM. You thought this had already happened? Well, almost. Mathematicians have proved that there are only so many new ideas in the world and we've pretty much seen them all. In today's difficult business environment, mathematicians are far better placed to work out precisely what will sell than the hairy, unwashed potheads who went to art school but can't paint a lick. Google has proved itself to be the world's most efficient advertising agency and its greatest problem will lie in keeping its mathematicians out of the clutches of the folks who brought you Tony the Tiger and the Five Dollar Foot Long song.

6. THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER WILL LAUNCH ON THE SAME DAY AS WINDOWS 7. This is perhaps the surest of all our predictions. The two greatest steps forward for mankind will not only be launched on the same day, but will do it in a joint promotion. The Collider's computers will all be running Windows 7, while Windows 7 will be available with a new, free dance video from the Collider scientists. It will be the greatest success in scientific and advertising history.

This is Technically Incorrect, yes, Incorrect, thanking all those who realize that entertainment is far more important than news and wishing you an extraordinary New Year. This post was generated using the Deleterious Substances Algorithm, kindly loaned to me by a chap from Google I met in a local sushi restaurant.

Peculiar Olympic viewing numbers have emerged from the Bay Area.

It seems that the Valley's finest have voted with their comforters and refused to play along with NBC's notion of, "You'll watch what we want you to watch, when we want you to watch it."

Although the San Francisco area averaged a 20.5 rating for the nine nights that ended last Sunday, this was down on the average rating for the Athens Games, which clipped along at 21.5.

Apparently, peacocks do turn white occasionally.

(Credit: CC Gaetan Lee)

It is not my intention to dance on NBC's bank vault. Some of the coverage has been excellent. And I personally have enormous affection for the ability of announcers such as Dan Hicks and Al Trautwig to make you feel you are in the presence of the Second Coming.

But the fact is that San Francisco finished fourth on the Nielsen Olympics ratings of 56 markets in 2004. This time around, it's 17th. Whatever you might think, it's not some strange isolated West Coast community. It is tied with Los Angeles. Folks in Sacramento, Calif., and Portland, Ore., seem to be losing patience too.

Would it be excessively brazen, therefore, to suggest that for the remainder of the Games, NBC switches to a live feed for the West Coast? Against my better judgment, I am prepared to say "please".

Surely NBC (and its advertisers) might be able to imagine that it would garner increased ratings from this risky, revolutionary strategy.

Perhaps it might mean more money too. Um, I mean viewer satisfaction.

It has to be a good thing for NBC to keep the engineers of our Future World happy. Otherwise, who knows what these irritable, irascible, irredeemably mercurial beings might do, in a fit of pique, to NBCOlympics.com?

NBC President Jeff Zucker has been explaining to the U.S. public just how right the network was to not screen the Olympic opening ceremony live.

"There's no question we did the right thing in holding the opening ceremony to air in prime time on NBC that night," he said on CNBC's Squawk Box. "The excitement that built out of word of mouth that the opening ceremony was the most spectacular thing that people had seen, that China had wanted to make a statement and they made a statement and people wanted to see that."

I have many friends who would like to be media moguls, so I pored over these words in the hope of learning something that will help their careers.

Mr. Zucker seems to believe that word of mouth comes from deprivation, from tantalizing people that something amazing has happened and that they will only be able to see it on NBC television.

I think I can understand that.

(Credit: CC Zoutedrop)

So one assumes, given that this strategy has been so successful, the next time NBC's cameras exclusively witness, say, an assassination or a politician saying or doing something nutty, they will keep it to themselves until prime time comes along. You know, just to build up the excitement.

However, I am still a little bit confused as to how he can be sure that if NBC had run the ceremony in real time, people would have told their friends that it was a dull, lifeless experience, not unlike the U.S. version of Coupling?

Might it not have been vaguely possible that those who saw it live would have offered positive word of mouth? You know, just as people do when they see a movie they enjoy. And might it not have been possible that these people would have tuned in again in prime time, given what a spectacular show it turned out to be? You know, just as people sometimes watch excellent movies twice, or enjoy reruns of Frasier.

Still, another thing I learned was that "the pipes," as Mr. Zucker refers to network television, are still the most powerful medium for mass viewing: "I think what's been great, we've been able to bottle that excitement since the opening ceremony and I think the team has captured that in every day since," he said.

I learned a lot from Mr. Zucker's use of the words "bottle" and "capture." Here's an example of how capture worked the other night to bottle ratings.

At the time, America's mouths were full of anticipatory words about the all-around women's gymnastics final.

Two Americans, Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin, were poised to show the Chinese that you could survive both puberty and grueling training and still be a wonderful gymnast.

So what time did Americans witness the final result? Why, a few seconds before one in the morning. Which didn't seem quite perfect to me.

I mean, if this mythical prime time was really the key to all the scheduling decisions, surely one might have expected that NBC would have enjoyed more viewers at, say, a few minutes before 10 in the evening? You see, that would have been the time on the West Coast when the result was finally decided.

But, no, the West Coast had its excitement bottled until after bedtime as it endured its usual tape delay and thousands and thousands of adults and children disappeared, never to be inspired by some of America's most wonderful women athletes.

That bottle seems to be a little corked to me.

Here's a thought. Just a small one. Is it possible that this TV attitude is affecting the NBC's online audience?

For all Mr. Zucker's public delight at the network's Olympian Olympic performance, I understand that some advertisers have not been entirely happy with the returns they are getting from the splendid NBCOlympics.com.

Indeed, word of mouth in the business is that several of NBC's advertisers have, over the last week, been discreetly attempting to augment their online presence by seeking to buy space on sites other than NBC's.

Does this mean that NBC's online Olympics site is somehow underdelivering on promises made?

While Mr. Zucker trumpets NBC's all-around performance, claiming some 30 million unique visitors to NBCOlympics.com, some interesting numbers have emerged from ComScore. They suggest that Yahoo's Olympic section actually had 8 million unique users in the U.S. in the week ending August 10. This compares to NBC Olympics.com's 6.7 million.

Brands are funny things. And NBC's is a very strong brand, one that has brought us brilliant programming such as The Office and 30 Rock, the latter a brave and funny series that superbly satirizes TV production.

But I wonder whether real people, real American people, not amused by NBC's bottling, capturing mentality, have expressed a small rebellion against the NBC brand and avoided the online offering in sufficient numbers to make the private projections fall short. As the ComScore numbers show, some people seem to have gone for their online Olympic fix elsewhere, despite the availability of good-quality video on NBC's site.

This is a pity because the NBCOlympics.com is a very fine place to spend time. While you're waiting for, you know, the live events to be shown.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

Who would choose to be in NBC's PR Department this week?

I couldn't possibly accuse any of them of taking steroids, but could you blame them if they slipped something a little special into their noon smoothie just to deal with another sleepless night?

Many critics have been kvetching about technological fakery during the opening ceremony, when fireworked footprints were CGI'd for home consumption.

I'm not sure how the CGI increased our excitement.

However, the description from NBC's Matt Lauer was definitely breathtaking: "You're looking at a cinematic device employed by Zhang Yimou here. This is actually almost animation."

Actually, it was animation, wasn't it? It was literally an artist's impression, except this one wasn't trying to sell you a timeshare.

NBC's Bob Costas, who is very clever, must have spent many moments composing his CGI voiceover: "We said earlier that aspects of this opening ceremony are almost like cinema in real time. Well this is quite literally cinematic."

Would you have preferred: "Here's some animation to give you a more vivid sense of what they're seeing out there"? I think I might have.

Just to be clear, this is not CGI.

(Credit: CC Sister 72)

All this reminded me of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics when the wondrous opening ceremony had, as one of its moments of high drama, an archer shooting a flaming arrow to light the Olympic flame.

Please don't tell anyone else, but he missed. The Spaniards had allowed for this possibility by rigging the flame's dish with so much gas that the arrow had to only pass somewhere near it for the flame to light up.

NBC has also suffered some slings and arrows by keeping the word "live" on the screen even on the feeds to the West Coast. Twice an hour, they remind you briefly that the pictures you're watching are, well, not literally live. In fact, they're not live at all.

Their defense is that this is no different from American Idol, which Westies also see on tape delay, with the occasional reminder that this is the case.

Please forgive me, but American Idol is to live Olympics what America's Top Model is to live NASCAR.

The reason why so much of sport still gets more than tolerable ratings is precisely because it is live. You get involved in it because it is happening right now. And love 'em or love 'em less, the folks at Fox try to make live baseball as live as it could possibly be, even identifying fans, managers and reluctant spouses engaged in the most spontaneous behaviors.

If you followed NBC's impeccable commercial logic, then surely Costas' favorite event, the World Series, should be on tape delay on the West Coast. Same goes for the Superbowl.

And if you think there's some jolly jingoism going on here, well, if I remember correctly, ABC and ESPN televised America's most popular international event, the World Cup, live. As in, you know, the thing you're seeing on screen is happening right now in some other country.

I know of no other country that would delay a sporting event that is happening live in the hope of expected commercial gain.

To me this is as odd as the fact that love seats are always so incredibly uncomfortable.

Still, NBCOlympics.com continues to be a source of utter Future World uplift. And that is why I must go. Argentina's finest field hockeyists are playing Great Britain online.

When I say online, I mean it's almost as if they were literally right there on my laptop. You know, cinematically speaking.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

I am sure that you were fearing censorship at these Beijing Olympics.

No, not censorship by the Chinese.

Censorship by those folks at NBC who would prefer you to watch what they want you to watch and, most specifically, when they want you to watch it.

Well, here I am live on a Friday night, freely watching NBCOlympics.com, and witnessing the quite glorious sight of a Chinese cyclist trying to mend his bike.

It looks to me as if his back wheel has suffered a case of the bends.

Looking beneath the screen, I see that his name is Zhang and he is in 135th place. Who knew there would be that many riders in this, um, race over some sort of distance along misty roads that resemble London at six o'clock in the morning (except that there are no drunks visible)?

Here's what is strange about NBC's online coverage: I have no idea what I am watching. Yes, I have clicked on the commentary, which takes the form of a live blog stream--except that the writer is endearingly honest about his predicament.

This is how he has just spoken to me in writing: "The first time up the major climb of the finish circuit has substantially damaged the peloton, but we are still waiting on names and time gaps."

So this commentator is telling me he has no idea who is winning, no idea who is second, no idea who is third, and no idea of the time differences between the riders.

The Beijing Olympic mascots. One from the right, The Tibetan antelope. Really.

(Credit: CC Tama Leaver)

If this commentary had appeared on NBC TV, the commentator in question would have been removed from his post quicker than persons of color and Mongolians have been asked to be removed from the bars of Beijing by the authorities. This commentator would have been sent to televisual Siberia.

There is a wonderfully eerie quality to the live online footage of this Olympic Some Sort of Cycle Race Along Roads.

The picture quality is quite spectacular. The mist is so real it could not possibly have been photoshopped in there by the Chinese authorities to provide some extra menacing ambience. This makes YouTube seem like student video. (Which I know some would contend it is.)

Meanwhile, the NBC livestream commentary is now telling me this: "Apologies for the data stream in the play-by-play window. We are trying to remedy the situation."

They cannot get a handle on the data. They are out of control. We have a situation here, people.

The riders, however, ride on. To the muted shouts of spectators who bang thunder sticks against the roadside barriers, as if they were praying for Kobe Bryant to miss another free throw.

Ah, NBC has heard my pleas and an overlay has appeared to tell me that we are watching a men's road race. The overlay, however, only stays on for a few seconds. Then it disappears again. So now I must rely on the official NBC Olympic online commentary. Here is the latest:

"The leading pursuit has shed some riders as they press towards the finish line 4'11" down on Patricio Almonacid."

No, I don't think they are four feet, eleven inches down. I think those are minutes and seconds. But all I can hear is the silence of a few rubber tires passing through a tunnel.

No voice is there to lead me through my bewilderment. No words of wisdom help to create excitement. Just the vague whistle of a spoke in the wildnerness. This is the live NBC Olympics.com experience.

Wait, wait.

The scrolling commentary has political news: "Iran, USA detente at the head of the main peloton as Iran's climber Hussein Askari takes a flyer and is joined by (we think) USA's Jason McCartney."

We think? We think? This might be a U.S. assault on Iran. And all they can say is "We think"?

I continue to ponder these words, watch the struggling bottom of the Iranian cyclist, and listen to the echoing nothingness that accompanies these besottingly shiver-making live images. It is as if NBC has hired John Carpenter to direct their online Olympic coverage.

And I can barely wait to see what he will do with the Romania versus Kazakhstan women's handball game.

I am tired, however. This has been live, uncensored (by NBCTV) online footage from the Olympics. I am comforted to know that I will slide beneath my comforter still a free man.

Free from the tyranny of NBC TV and happy in the otherworldly bosom of NBCOlympics.com.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.