Atlas Shrugged movie producer John Aglialoro said recently, according to an article in the LA Times, that it’s now unlikely he’ll make parts 2 and 3 of Ayn Rand’s epic novel.  And, even though Aglialoro expects the picture to make a profit, the main reason he cites for abandoning the project is because of poor reviews.

The LA Times pieces reads like his motivations for making the picture were mainly to get good reviews by the press.  But why should that matter?  Sure, the picture isn’t great, but given its low budget and rushed production schedule, I highly doubt a cinematic masterpiece was thought possible.

Could the picture have been better, even given these constraints?  Yes.  But it’s also very easy to Monday-morning quarterback the whole endeavor, and the “I could have done it better,” attitude amongst critics and even Objectivists is easier said than done.

That’s not to say that that we the audience—movie reviewer or not—aren’t entitled to our opinions.  Even if the reviews are bad, Aglialoro should be cashing in on this fact, embrace Rand’s individualist philosophy and say: “Judge for yourself: see the movie.”

Still, to blame the Atlas’s modest success at the box office on poor reviews is a cop-out.  The fact that the movie was reviewed as widely as it was only helped gain exposure for the movie, regardless of what those reviews said. Algialoro implicitly knows this, as he cites The New York Times’ decision not to review the movie as the biggest blow by the media at large.  Further, given that the movie received almost no marketing beyond press reviews and grass-roots efforts, that Atlas posted box office results in the millions of dollars is pretty good.

And, anyway, reviews in and of themselves do not make or break a picture, and there are countless examples at the box office to demonstrate this.  Even if one believes reviews do have an impact, their biggest impact would be on the movie’s first weekend at the box office.  Yet Atlas Shrugged earned a modest taking in its opening weekend.  After that, it’s mostly up to word of mouth and marketing.

I believe Atlas Shrugged’s box office earnings is directly correlated to the quality of the movie: not terrible, but not great.

If Aglialoro didn’t want to venture on to Part 2 and 3 because he was not able to make the kind of movie he wanted to, then fine.  Or if his investment will not earn the kind of returns he wants to get with his money, that is certainly understandable.  But to blame it on reviewers is not only a red herring: it also implies a second-handed motivation to making the movie to begin with.

Making a martyr of oneself to the mainstream media certainly isn’t going to garner any sympathy with audiences—and will only hurt his chances in selling his movie to those ancillary markets he so desperately needs.

The King’s Speech was a deserved  Best Picture winner at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards on Sunday. However, the awards show itself was, to put it politely, much to be desired.

My admiration for The King’s Speech and the climactic speech at the end got me thinking: What if “King Oscar” addressed his fellow academy members about the state of the awards show? Here is my answer:

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I’ve had a few months under my belt now as an audio podcast producer and my two shows, The Movie Film Show and The Independent Entrepreneur, are off to a modest start. Bootstrapping these shows with almost no budget is not easy and the struggle to grow my audience has been, at times, frustrating.

But I’ve learned a lot so far about what works, and I’m sure there’s plenty more to do. Most importantly, I’m realizing the need to create mobile-friendly versions of my shows.

I’ve set up my shows on a Wordpress Blog using Blubrry’s PowerPress plug-in, which is terrific. It’s saved me an enormous amount of development time and allowed me to focus on creating content. One of the services Blubrry provides is a measurement tool that shows how many downloads my shows have received, including what form people are downloading them.

I’ve produced twenty episodes of The Movie Film Show, and I finally have enough data to draw some conclusions. But first, the facts:

Few people listen on the Web. Only 7% listen through the Web site’s flash player tool. The rest are people downloading the shows through iTunes and on their mobile devices.  In fact, 53% of downloads come from applications like iTunes, and the remaining 40% are from mobile devices.

I was amazed at the number from mobile devices, especially considering I don’t currently have a mobile-friendly version of my shows.  It makes sense, though.  Audio podcasts are best listened to on the go, whether in the car or at the gym, and Smart Phones are a great way to grab such content while out and about.

I’ve concluded that enhancing the mobile experience is my top priority. Here are three action points I will begin to execute and want to share with my fellow audio-podcasters:

1. Create a mobile-friendly site. If the current version of your site is mobile friendly, that’s great. But if you have things like a Flash player and what not, they will not work on devices like the iPhone.
2. Create a ‘download MP3’ link for each show. Most mobile devices can download and play these files just fine. That means all listeners have to do is visit your URL and click on the latest show download link to listen. Get rid of any links or features that don’t work on a mobile device (like Flash players).
3. Make sure the file size of your MP3s doesn’t exceed mobile download limits. Some ISPs, like AT&T, limit downloads on mobile to devices to files sizes less than 20 megabytes each. Make sure your shows are under that limit. If they are longer, split them into multiple files on the mobile version of your site, if possible.

Related Article: Why I Prefer Audio Podcasts

Many are paranoid about privacy, such as how our activity is tracked online.  One of the biggest objections I see is that Web sites and advertising companies will use our personal information in order to display more relevant advertisements to us.

Why are we so scared about that?

Americans, I think, are rightly concerned about “big brother” watching what we do, and many equate corporations watching our behavior and tracking our interests as impeding on our privacy.  But there is a fundamental difference between the real “big brother,” i.e., government, impeding on our privacy and a company supposedly doing so.

When we interact with a company or another person, it is on a voluntary basis.  We chose to go to Whole Foods or Ralphs or visit Google or Facebook.  We do not have such a choice when it comes to the government.  Any corporation, no matter what the size, cannot force us to do anything.  It can’t force us to buy their products, use their services, or visit their Web sites.  Only the government can do this; it can, and does.  For starters, it forces us to pay taxes, get our car smogged, and buy health insurance.

Since government’s proper function is to protect individual rights, when it comes knocking on our door and asking for information that could only be used to violate our rights, clearly fears of “big brother” are justified.

How much money do you make?  What is your ethnicity?  What are your religious beliefs?  Such questions are none of the government’s business, yet when and if required by law, we have to provide such information to the government.  That is not the case with a company.

The purpose of a company is to make money.  It is to offer us value in exchange for money.  It is not to destroy value.  So when an advertising company wants to know our income, our age, our interests, our buying habits, etc., this information is used by the company to potentially provide us with better value in the future.  It uses this information for the purpose of better their product and marketing efforts to reach the right buyers, i.e., the people who want to buy their product the most.  Maybe it’s you.  Maybe it’s not.

The smarter advertising technology, the happier I am.  If I never see an ad for ESPN again in my life, that’s a good thing, because ESPN should know that the only game I like is Badminton.  Yet when Badminton is being played on the Olympics, perhaps NBC could send me an e-mail alert telling me where to go watch it and when.

That’s a good thing for ESPN and for me: They won’t waste their time trying to reach me and I don’t’ have to sort through ESPN spam.  It’s also a good thing for NBC and me: They can target me specifically—someone who actually may be interested in their product—and I probably would have forgotten to even look for it in the first place, but once reminded gone and watched it.

Am I giving up my privacy?  In a small sense, yes, but there is no harm to me and, in fact, only value to be gained.  “Giving up” your privacy is not necessarily a bad thing.  You do it every time you introduce yourself to someone: “Hello, my name is Sean.”  Now you know my name.  You didn’t before.  This allows you to engage with me in some way—or even avoid me in the future if you don’t want to deal with me.

Of course, companies and other people can and do violate rights.  But this is the exception, not the norm.  And such violations should (and generally are) illegal and individuals should be protected against those who do violate their rights by force—which is the proper function of government.

So the next time you’re worried that Best Buy may be watching your behavior as you walk through their store, or a Facebook is tracking how you use their social network, or the supermarket asks you to sign up for a loyalty program, know that in all likelihood, they are doing so for the purpose of improving their product or to better reach or communicate with you about things you actually may want to buy in the future.

Often times we get “junk mail,” whether electronic or via snail mail, and we cry for privacy laws because they are a hassle to sort through and throw away.  But when we get or see content we actually want, we don’t think of it that way.  It just feels like our friends at Bed Bath & Beyond were kind enough to send us another twenty percent off coupon, and we don’t cry about our privacy.

My biggest constraint when using Twitter is the experience hopping from one device to another, such as from the iPhone to the iPad to the Web browser on my Mac laptop or PC desktop. There just isn’t a good way to keep my place each time I read my Twitter feed.

This isn’t a problem if I stick to a single device (I use Twitterriffic), since it keeps the screen on the last tweets I’ve read whenever I load the program. I find myself avoiding looking at Twitter on anything other than my iPhone, because then I have to figure out what the last thing I read was, or scan through a bunch of posts I’ve already read when jumping between devices.

With a “last read” or “bookmark” feature implemented into their API, software developers such as Twitterrific, TweetDeck, etc., could use this to sync the last message read, and thus only display the messages one hasn’t read yet (or mark that point with some visual indicator). Twitter could implement the same feature on their site by visually displaying this mark at the appropriate place and jumping to that point on the screen.

(As a side note, it would be nice to read tweets from oldest to newest on the site as well. I tend to read from the bottom to the top, and that’s a little clunky.)

How would this work? Every time a user downloaded a batch of tweets successfully, Twitter would update the “last read” indicator for that user, so the next time a request for tweets is received (even if from a different device), this information would be passed along to the application and dealt with properly.

This would save everyone valuable time when consuming their tweets across multiple devices.

If Twitter doesn’t implement this in their API, I would switch to any software that did internally. There are versions of Twitterrific and Tweetdeck for iPhone and iPad, so if I had to stay in one ecosystem to achieve this, I would.