DialIdol

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DialIdol is both the name of a computer program for Microsoft Windows and its associated website that began tracking voting trends for American Idol contestants during the fourth season. DialIdol sprang to prominence at the start of the fifth season. The program allows users to automatically vote for the American Idol candidates of their choice using their PC's modem. The program then reports back to the main website, which keeps track of the results based on which contestant has the most busy signals. It is based in Cleveland, Ohio.

Users can choose to vote equally for their chosen contestants, choose to keep certain candidates "safe" (by voting for their chosen contestant who is lowest ranked), or choose to keep certain contestants "unsafe" (by voting for the lowest rank candidate who is not on their list).

In March 2006, they received a "cease and desist" order from Fox, who alleged copyright infringement. According to the site's creator, Jim Hellriegel, Fox's lawyers also told him that his site was acting as a potential "spoiler," as they claimed it posted results. The site was taken down temporarily. After consulting with lawyers and determining that what they were doing was legal, the Web site was taken back on-line.^[1]

The program's developers estimate that using it to predict the results has about 85% accuracy. The accuracy climbed substantially when the formula for weighting the busy signal ratio was altered to reflect the U.S. population distribution (higher weight to East and West coast results than the rest of the country). This formula was first put to the test on April 6, 2006; as a result, the newly-weighted results correctly predicted the bottom three contestants, in order, hours before the official results show. The correct prediction spawned national attention as a result.^[2]

By the middle of the season, the show's producers added additional phone lines for each contestant sooner than ever before in the show's history (final six). The DialIdol developers were successfully able to incorporate the additional lines into the overall calculations and released a new version of the software with a refined formula on May 9, 2006. Following these changes, the site correctly predicted Chris Daughtry's elimination on May 10, 2006 ^[3] as well as Elliott Yamin's elimination on May 17, 2006.^[4] In the final week of American Idol Season 5, DialIdol also predicted that Taylor Hicks would win over Katharine McPhee.^[5]