In case you haven’t noticed, American Idol Season 5 is being replayed on the Fox Reality TV Channel. It’s turning into another opportunity for me to get sucked into the show again and awaken and relive some deep-seated memories of events both on and off tube that happened earlier this year.

It’s just like when you hear an old song and you are sent back to a time when you heard it elsewhere, or when you fall ill and some kind of strange regression takes place and you feel deja vu about being sick in bed as a kid under the care of a guardian. Perhaps it’s some Pavlovian thing that happens to me but I certainly get that effect with tv shows that really pack me a punch….most notably this one.

There are already American Idol Season 6 advertisements appearing and reminding us that they’ll be back in January. Just great — I can’t wait to revisit my old haunts such as the boards, the spoiler sites and this special place: the awesome DialIdol site.

DialIdol is where all the post AI performance night activities culminate and you find out whether your voting efforts are really paying off. It’s a real-time vote tracker for the show and being the geek that I am, I find it fascinating how it works. It extrapolates voting totals using downloadable software that people use to set up and track their land line calls for specific American Idol contestants. It counts busy signals from your phone, using this as the measure for “popularity” when you call for certain contestants and through some formula calculates the contestants’ relative rankings. And recently, the site has expanded to cover more programs that involve audience voting such as So You Think You Can Dance?, correctly predicting Benji as the winner and Celebrity Duets, again correctly placing Alfonso Ribeiro on top. It now is in use during Dancing With The Stars and is there to confirm what is known all along, that Joey Lawrence and Mario Lopez are leading in votes.

It is such a great invention and am glad it’s around to keep things honest for the producers of these talent shows. Can’t wait to play this game again.