Tuesday, Massachusetts will elect a new Senator.

So far, Scott Brown, the Republican, looks likely to win in a landslide. A big landslide.

Elected Democrats are predictably freaking out. Well that they should. This race may be a bellwether for the next ten years.

If the establishment Democrat, Martha Coakley, loses big to a Republican in Massachusetts, then no Democrat will feel that their seat is “safe” anywhere. If a Democrat can lose “Ted Kennedy's seat,” then all bets are off on every Democrat “safe” seat.

If Coakley loses, and loses big, watch for a rebellion among elected Democrats who will realize that they could lose their cushy sinecures by being associated too closely with Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's flavor of politics.

The polls are all over the place. There are many reasons for this. The whole polling industry is struggling with some huge changes that they must come to grips with.

The primary problem is cellphones and cellphone only households.

If you would like a first hand anecdotal feel for how big of a problem cellphones present to the polling industry, ask the following question in the next large group that you are in. “How many of you no longer have a land-line phone and only have cellphones in your household?” If your group is made up largely of people under forty years of age, odds are that half to over half of them will be cellphone only households. This is very significant. It is a game changer in the polling business. It is also a number that is very likely to increase over the next ten years. In twenty years, land-line phones may be as anachronistic as Telegraph machines.

There are rules for calling cellphone sample that make it very expensive to work with. Mainly, you cannot use any kind of automated dialing method. If you are knowingly dialing on cellphone sample, you must hand dial the phone numbers.

Robo polls will miss cellphone only respondents. The results of a robo poll are ever more doubtful due to the fact that the robot dialed poll cannot account for the opinions of respondents that live in cellphone only households. (Texting may be a way around this problem. So far as I know, there are no rules against using automated systems to send out text messages to cellphones.[Where there is a will, there is a way - especially if there is money involved.])

When it comes down to the wire in regards to elections, I find that I am much more trustful of the punters then I am of the pollsters.

The punters ask a different question. They do not ask “Who will you vote for?” they ask “Who are you willing to bet good money, your money, on to win?” Its a question of knowledge, not of opinion. Which makes its a very different question. The results can be significantly different and potentially far more accurate.

Predicting elections was once something that the odds-makers dominated. Scientific telephone polling changed the game and allowed telephone pollsters to take that role away from the bookies. Now the game may be changing again, giving the advantage in predicting election outcomes back to the gamblers.

Take a look at Intrade and watch the election numbers as they come in Tuesday. Election Markets may be the way of things to come. Time will tell.

And these are very exciting and interesting times indeed.

Can the New York Times Be Marketed Like Porn?

The New York Times will soon try a strategy that will reduce its readership and relevance, further accelerating its decline.

How?

They will try to charge you to read their articles.

This model does work for online porn. (It is pretty amazing that it does since so much Internet porn is available completely free of charge.)

The New York Times must think that their content will sell as well as porn. I think that they should keep their pants on.

News, for the most part, is not porn.

Most people will just begin to skip links to the NYT and to any other news organization that attempts this online subscription (Porn) model.

Display ads can still be seen in the off the rack "paper" newspapers. When people used to regularly read news printed on paper, display ads were profitable.

Then the Internet happened and print readership plummeted. Click-through ads were then touted and became the de facto norm for online advertising.

Click-through ads are stupid. Think about the long ago days of yore when you actually read a "paper" newspaper. There were ads all over the execrable thing were there not? Did you drop everything when you came across an advertisement about a product or service that interested you, pick up the phone and call or hop in your car to run out and buy it? No? No shit.

What on earth would make anyone think that such a model would then work for news-sites on the Internet?

Display ads in the paper and even the ads on television and radio worked on the concept of impressions. The idea was to use the ads to put the product brand or service brand in your mind for when you were actually ready to buy that type of product or service. The impression concept focused on shaping your opinion of which brand you would buy when you were ready to buy. There was no expectancy of an immediate customer response while you were reading through the newspaper.

While the Internet changed the way the news was delivered to the reader, it did not change the way the reader responded to display advertisements.

Display ads can be profitable online. Keep them simple. Sell them by the old impression model. Human psychology has not changed even if the news delivery medium has.

Leave the click-through ads for the adult content websites.

Communities versus Cults.

There is a difference.

Boeing's troubles.

The following is from an article in the Oct. 7th Seattle Times. In the news stands, it is the "above the fold" story.

Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with the Teal Group, said the common denominators for the two delayed jet programs are a lack of adequate project-management expertise and a shortage of engineering resources.

"There were an awful lot of good people retired after 2000," Aboulafia said. "That, coupled with the decision to outsource major chunks of engineering requirements to suppliers and partners, seems to have resulted in a severe talent shortage and a loss of tribal knowledge."

The population is aging. The economy is in terrible condition. The problems with the “loss of tribal knowledge” is something interesting to be mindful of in the coming years as more and more people leave the workforce in every sector due to either retirement or layoffs.