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Fans flock to dialidol.com

‘Idol’ site calls up surprisingly accurate results

By JAMES A. FUSSELL
The Kansas City Star

If you don’t want to know who may be voted off next on “American Idol,” stop reading now.

Still here?

OK. There’s a Web site — DialIdol.com — that predicts exactly that. The site’s software has correctly predicted 15 out of the 18 idols to be eliminated so far in Fox’s popular singing competition, earning an 83.3 percent accuracy rate. Last week it nailed the all-important “bottom three” in exact order: Paris Bennett was fifth, Chris Daughtry sixth and Ace Young was voted off.

How can it know the votes ahead of time?

It can’t. The show keeps those secret until Wednesday night’s show. But for the fans, it’s the next best thing to having a mole inside the show. The site gets about 2.5 million hits in the 24-hour period from Tuesday night to Wednesday night.

DialIdol lets users download an Internet speed-dialing application written by self-described computer geek Jim Hellriegel of Cleveland. On broadband connections, the software works through a user’s modem to allow fans to vote for their favorite contestant more quickly and more often. It also allows users to list their favorites and have the program direct their phone-in votes to whichever is most vulnerable each week.

More than 2,000 people are using the free software.

Here’s the key: DialIdol measures the frequency of busy signals on each contestant’s line. It then translates that information into which contestant is most likely to be voted off, assuming a higher frequency of calls indicates the contestant’s popularity. DialIdol isn’t perfect and it can’t measure votes by text messaging. But it’s close enough to have created a sensation.

After the voting begins following each Tuesday’s show, “Idol” message boards are filled with fans who have checked DialIdol for “results” in real time. If their favorite is doing poorly they make frantic pleas for support.

“Please vote for Elliott!” a poster wrote on one Web site. “He’s on the bottom on DialIdol! We have to save E!”

The fans aren’t the only ones who have taken note of DialIdol. Fox recently sent Hellriegel a cease and desist letter.

Hellriegel hired a lawyer, removed copyrighted material, added a disclaimer and kept the site running.

He got the idea last year doing laundry.

“I couldn’t dial the phone and do the laundry at the same time,” he said. “I liked Carrie and Bo, but I also liked Constantine and Lindsey. I noticed that Bo and Carrie’s lines were always busy. I took that to mean they were doing well. It was the opposite for (the other two). That was an indicator that they weren’t getting a lot of votes. I decided to write the software.”

Just can’t wait to see who will be voted off this week?

DialIdol and see for yourself.