A week after Countdown host Keith Olbermann and guest Michael Moore sparked a Twitter protest over their dismissive treatment of rape allegations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, Moore made an appearance on The Rachel Maddow Show that was much anticipated by those protesters. Host Rachel Maddow opened the segment by voicing their central premise, without directly referencing them, and Moore, also without addressing the protest directly, spoke about the importance of taking rape allegations seriously. He did not apologize for his earlier assertion that Julian Assange was only accused of consensual sex with a broken condom, nor did he retract it.
Maddow did acknowledge the #MooreAndMe protest in a post-show blog post, but not as she introduced her guest, Michael Moore, thusly:
The timing could not be more suspicious. The man accused says he’s being pursued for political reasons. But even if you’re suspicious about the timing, there are two women who went to the police with what are essentially date-rape charges against this guy.
This doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
Can your suspicion about the forces arrayed against Julian Assange and Wikileaks — your suspicion about the timing and pursuit of these charges — coexist with respect for the women making these accusations against him and with a commitment to take rape allegations seriously, even when the person accused is someone that for other reasons you like?
To be fair to Maddow, she’s in a tough spot, as her MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann emerged as a focal point of the protest, but she should have asked this question directly to Moore. Instead, she asked him to explain, once again, why he posted $20,000 in bail money for Assange. In answering that question, Moore volunteered:
Every woman who claims to have been sexually assaulted or raped has to be, must be, taken seriously. Those charges have to be investigated to the fullest extent possible. For too long, and too many women have been abused in our society, because they were not listened to, and they just got shoved aside. . . .So I think these two alleged victims have to be treated seriously and Mr. Assange has to answer the questions.
This was a sharp departure from the remarks that started the protest, and no doubt directly attributable to it, but it was also a subversion of the premise of #MooreAndMe. The protest derived its name from Moore’s debut film, Roger & Me, in which Moore spends the entire film trying to get GM CEO Roger Smith to just talk to him about the harm he’d done. Moore didn’t do that, he pretended the whole thing never happened.
As for the goals of the #MooreAndMe protest, while they commendably got Moore to change his rhetoric, there’s still apparently work to be done:
Please tweet @MMFlint, using the hashtag #Mooreandme, until we have an explanation from Michael Moore, and preferably an apology, and preferably $20,000, donated to an anti-sexual-assault organization of his choice.
You told us the little guy had to stand up, Mr. Moore. You told us the authority had to be held accountable for harming communities. You told us that the Big Lies were worth exposing. But you’re promoting the Big Lie, you’re harming our community, and this time around, the little guy is us.
We can be loud. We can be persistent. I hope you’re prepared.
The balance of the interview featured some smart, tough questions from Maddow over Moore’s Assange idolatry. Here’s the full interview, in two parts, from MSNBC:
Part Two:
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Over two years ago I wrote about a startup called StyleHop that set out to identify hot fashion items through the use of casual games — instead of having to fill out a survey or poll, it would generate fashion recommendations based on how you played these games. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out (nor did the startup’s second business plan) and today the company is announcing that it will be shutting its doors early next month.
Some of the company’s struggles stem from the financial meltdown of 2008 — founder David Reinke explains that after raising some seed money, StyleHop was planning to close a Series A in October 2008, which happened to be right when Sequoia’s RIP: Good Times was making the rounds. The funding round never happened, and the company quickly had to shift gears from its consumer-facing fashion games to something more directly related to generating revenue.
This second model was to help retailers with their merchandise selection by assembling a consumer panel of women who had proven that they could pick winning items. To create this panel StyleHop asked prospective panelists to rate items that had already been released, and compared their predictions to historical data to see who had the keenest eye.
StyleHop signed up two big-box retailers as pilot customers, who used the service to pick out which fashion items to feature in their stores the following season. And it apparently worked: Reinke says that StyleHop panelist predictions were seven times more accurate that the predictions of in-house ‘product pickers’ when comparing how each item sold versus how much inventory had been ordered.
Unfortunately, despite these encouraging results, the service couldn’t land any larger-scale rollouts. Reinke attributes this in part to the company’s lack of funding, and also to the fact that many retailers weren’t ready to experiment with new merchandising techniques during the economic downturn. He also believes that StyleHop may have taken the wrong approach when dealing with these retailers — it was mostly negotiating with middle- to senior-level managers, some of whom could have their jobs potentially threatened if the system worked. Instead, Reinke thinks StyleHop should have tried to work more directly with CEOs and company boards.
The failure of StyleHop is interesting in part because there are currently an increasing number of services looking to reinvent the way fashion is selected and presented to consumers. ModCloth has done extremely well turning this model on its head (see my interview with the founders right here), and Moxsie is also looking to help crowdsource merchandise selection. However, both of these are targeting the indie fashion market — StyleHop was hoping to reinvent merchandising for mass-market stores.
StyleHop has been added to the TechCrunch Deadpool.
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