{"id":2746,"date":"2008-07-15T10:43:40","date_gmt":"2008-07-15T10:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/15\/sizzle-no-such-thing-as-bad-pu\/"},"modified":"2008-07-15T10:43:40","modified_gmt":"2008-07-15T10:43:40","slug":"sizzle-no-such-thing-as-bad-pu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/15\/sizzle-no-such-thing-as-bad-pu\/","title":{"rendered":"Sizzle: No Such Thing As Bad Publicity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you have no doubt noticed, my early-morning review of Randy Olson’s Sizzle<\/cite><\/a> was part of a concerted effort to get blogs to review the movie all on the same day. It’s an experiment of sorts in using blogs to promote the movie.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Olson, it seems to be an experiment designed to test the old adage that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right.” Most of the blog reviews collected at the ScienceBlogs page for the film<\/a> were, um, less than glowing. My own kind of “Meh.” review is one of the better ones on ScienceBlogs.<\/p>\n

Having looked at a whole bunch of these reviews, I have two meta-comments that I would like to make regarding the whole thing:<\/p>\n

1) I was genuinely surprised at how many people were confused about the format. Granted, I went in knowing it was a mockumentary (it says so on the promotional website<\/a>), but it seemed pretty obvious to me that it wasn’t all real. The only point where I had any doubts was in the sequence with Dr. Chilingarian, who was almost too perfectly goofy to be real. I thought it was perfectly clear which people were actors and which people were real.<\/p>\n

2) This isn’t really surprising to me, but I thought it was interesting that the most positive reviews came from non-scientists, while the scientists writing reviews were more negative (it’s not a perfect correlation– Jake Young<\/a> wrote the most positive review I’ve seen<\/a>). The most convenient pair to illustrate this is Jennifer Ouellette<\/a> and Sean Carroll<\/a>— they both had doubts about the movie, but her review reads as much more favorable than his.<\/p>\n

As I said, this isn’t really a surprise to me. Most of the complaints from scientists were of the form “It needed more data,” which probably counts as missing the point in a way that illustrates the point. It was interesting to see, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you have no doubt noticed, my early-morning review of Randy Olson’s Sizzle was part of a concerted effort to get blogs to review the movie all on the same day. It’s an experiment of sorts in using blogs to promote the movie. Unfortunately for Olson, it seems to be an experiment designed to test… Continue reading Sizzle: No Such Thing As Bad Publicity?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,13,48,33,35,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-education","category-environment","category-in_the_news","category-movies","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}