Sunday, September 12, 2010

Horoscope Review: The Mystery of LSN's Daily Horoscopes

An impressive daily horoscope column copyrighted only by "LSN, Inc.," made me curious to know the astrologer's name. So I emailed LSN, an Atlanta-based mobile media and marketing company that feeds mobile websites "content," such as weather, gas prices and horoscopes. And got no answer. But I still wanted to let people know about that nice substantial scope and credit its author.

Searches showed the column scattered across the Net, and syndicated also by a service called Topix that does what LSN does: spread content through online and wireless mass media. Nowhere was the individual astrologer's name revealed. But the searches proved that the horoscopes were not computerized but in fact custom-written for each sign each day.

Finally I matched the syndicated scopes with an individual astrologer: Rob Tillett, editor and publisher of Australia's astrologycom.com. Tillett's team of astrologers offers a site with 4,000 (four thousand!) pages of information: lovescopes (a.k.a. the "Nude Horoscope," not very naughty); weekly, monthly and annual forecasts; teenscopes; compatibility stuff; and articles that discuss in depth, for example, pagan holidays or the meaning of Venus in Scorpio. Tillett confirmed that he writes the daily horoscopes, and they are syndicated to a firm called Tinbu. Tinbu's clients include Topix and LSN. Some U.S. television networks feed LSN horoscopes to their mobile sites. I now realize that LSN never sent me the astrologer's name because they they had no idea who it was. Only a search back through a long chain of providers uncovered the author. And, half a world away, he had no idea he was LSN's astrologer, either, and as such had at least one big fan.

Tillett's daily Sun-Sign forecasts on his home site, astrologycom.com, offer half a month's worth of daily forecasts: September 1 through 15 are online on September 1. Feel confident that Tillett correctly states the Moon's current placement in the zodiac, or when planets go retrograde. Now, fifteen daily scopes and 4,000 pages can be distracting, and of course contain some bloat -- real astrology doesn't generate or "predict" lucky colors or numbers -- but they're harmless. Prepared to dismiss the site's monthly "Tarotscopes" by Lili Rosace because horoscopes aren't done with Tarot cards -- period -- reading them I saw that she's a real Tarot reader, and I respect that.

Five stars for the daily forecasts' integrity and the site's educational and entertainment value.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the praise! I no longer publish astrologycom.com, though I still provide daily horosocopes to Tinbu, who on-sells them to other sites. My new site is AstroScope Me, http://www.astroscope.me. You can see the forecasts there, but astrologycom.com is no longer updating. I do still publish Truthstar.com, and our forecasts are there too!

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