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Fans of the movie Clerks will have an opportunity to make themselves a permanent part of the sequel, Clerks II. The first 10,000 Myspace users who add Mooby Presents Clerks II as a MySpace friend will have their names listed in the end credits of the new movie.

Seems like a great word of mouth marketing stunt to me. Tons of people will quickly add Mooby as a friend to get in the end credits. And then those peoples’ friends will stumble on the Mooby MySpace, which includes trailors and other promotional materials about the movie. Very smart.

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the news aggregation site Digg expand its’ focus beyond Technology news in an effort to reach more eyeballs. We’ve also seen Netscape launch a Digg competitor that is also aimed at a wide audience, covering just about every topic you can think of. The macro approach of Digg and Netscape is a pretty clear attempt to compete with large, traditional media websites. Digg is no longer a niche website aimed at a small community of users. It has grown beyond that and is trying to go big time.

What’s interesting to me is that while Digg and Netscape go macro, you have new super-micro Digg clones popping up every day. There are now Digg clones for sports fans, women, marketers, alternative rockers, American Idol freaks, Spanish speaking astronomy enthusiasts, Mozilla addicts, celebrity gossip fans, the MySpace generation, web designers, medical news junkies, soccer fans, environmentalists, video karaoke enthusiasts and PR 2.0 types.

Anyone reading this can use sites like Crispy News to create their own Digg clone in a few minutes. For free.

This space will be interesting to watch in the coming months and years. For Digg, I guess the question will end up being is bigger really better? By expanding its focus and presumably bringing in lots of new, potentially less savvy users, will Digg end up alienating its’ core community? Will people migrate to more focused, micro communities?

I don’t really have an answer here, although I think it is inevitable that Digg will lose some of its soul by expanding so aggressively. We’ll see.

<Came up with the idea for this post by reading this blog entry by Rohit Bhargava.>

Those polling maniacs over at Rasmussen Reports released a study today that claims that 69% of Americans still have a positive opinion of Wal-Mart, while 29% do not like the superstore. The report revealed the following:

• Americans who are in the lower or middle income brackets are more likely to have a positive opinion of Wal-Mart than those in the upper income bracket.

• Of the 25% of Americans who claim they rarely or never shop at Wal-mart, 35% percent think positively of Wal-Mart.

• Those surveyed say that if given a chance to shop at either Wal-Mart, Target or K-Mart, 48% would prefer to shop at Wal-Mart, 30% would go to Target and only 9% would go to K-Mart.

I’m curious to see if there’s a difference in category. For instance, if someone was asked if they would prefer to buy clothes from Wal-Mart, Target or K-Mart, would they still choose Wal-Mart? Or, if they were given the chance to have a shopping spree at either Wal-Mart, Target or K-Mart, would they still pick Wal-Mart?

College football recruiting is followed obsessively by lots of folks and the recruits a school pulls in each year often make or break a coach. Entire businesses, like Rivals.com and Scout.com, have been built around keeping track of the decisions made by 17 year old kids around the country. And coaches that can connect with kids during the recruiting process are just as valuable as coaches who, can, well, actually coach.

So it should come as no surprise that coaches are using MySpace as a recruiting tool (or at least appear to be). I give you the MySpace profile of Texas A&M assistant football coach Van Malone.

I really don’t know if this is real or not. If it is, it seems like a great move by Coach Malone. It’s another way for recruiters to connect with high school recruits. Oh, and, Hook Em’ Horns.

Jackie Huba of the Church of the Customer blog shares how stories spread, with the help of YouTube and audio. As you may have heard, an AOL customer tried to cancel his account and dealt with a CSR who pretty much wouldn’t fulfill his request. The customer, Vincent Ferrari, who is also a blogger, has been on a number of broadcast programs and clips of his interviews (as well as the conversation he recorded with the CSR) are available almost everywhere online. (more…)

A new study published jointly by Duke University and the University of Arizona found that Americans have fewer close friends today than they did twenty years ago. The average number of people who are considered close confidants dropped by nearly one-third, from 2.94 in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004.

The study speculates that the drop may be a result of increased work hours and/or the use of the Internet for socializing. The theory is that friendships made and maintained online are inferior to those based on in person contact. So while the Internet may allow us to keep in touch and “know” lots of people, the relationships are shallower than those forged in person.

I buy this argument. I communicate with a lot of folks using the Internet, but my best friends are universally people I’ve spent countless in person hours with. If the Internet is leading people to skip the in person part of friendship, I definitely think that would lead to more superficial relationships.

Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, a Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusettes, recently published an excellent study on the habits of 74 business bloggers. Here are some stats from the survey:

• 49% of the bloggers surveyed said that the time blogging take is the major drawback to having a blog
• 66% of those surveyed spent less than 1 hour a day writing blog entires; 31% spent between 1-3 hours
• 95% of those surveyed felt their blogs were successful at achieving their goals
• 58% reported that their blogs were llinked to from their company’s homepage
• 89% of bloggers said they got less than 10 comments on their blog a day

If you work at a company thinking of starting a blog, the study makes for an interesting read.

Via Micropersuasion.

A few weeks ago I found myself in the dairy section of Whole Foods with my girlfriend trying to remember how many cups were in a pint. We were picking up ingredients for a recipe that called for 3 cups of buttermilk. She picked up one pint, saying, “This should do it.”

I thought that a pint contained a lot less than 3 cups, but I was not sure. I looked around and could not find any one of the many helpful Whole Foods employees that normally patrol the aisles. Here’s the thing – my friends and family members think that I am really smart because I always seem to have answers for these types of questions. It is not that I am very smart, but just that I am usually in front of a computer when usually asked these questions and I naturally ‘ask’ Google – who has not failed me yet. In fact – using Google Maps I have helped friends and family get directions when they are lost and on the road. Google Maps + me = personal Onstar!

So in order to avert sure culinary meltdown, I opened up my trusty P900 Sony Ericsson phone and shot off a text message to 46645 (GOOGL), Google’s short code. For those of you who do not know, short codes are “special telephone numbers, significantly shorter than full telephone numbers, which can be used to address SMS and MMS messages from mobile telephones.” You may have seen short code enabled voting recently on television during the World Cup.

I asked GOOGL ‘how many cups in a pint’? In a matter of seconds, I had a message back, saying “Google Calculator: 1 US pint = 2 US Cups.” Without saying I told you so, I picked up an extra 1/2 pint of buttermilk and headed to the checkout line.

I wondered what else I could do with an SMS and Google. I went to run some errands last weekend and realized midway through my journey that I had neglected to write down the address of the store I was going to. Not to worry though – I sent a quick text to Google again with the name of the store and the tentative zip code I thought it was located in. A short while later I received a text back from Google with both the phone number and address. Despite receiving the wrong zip code, Google was able to figure out which store I was looking for. Pretty cool Google.

In the past few days I have used Google SMS to check sports scores for my Boston Red Sox (texting ‘Red Sox’ to GOOGL) and movie listings for the area (texting movie: theaters 20007). In poking around on the Google SMS website, there are a number of other queries that you can also run. These include: searches on driving directions, random questions and price comparison with Froogle.

With product pricing, you can use the specific name of the product (Yamaha DSP A1000), the general name of the product (stereo amplifier), the ISBN code if it is a book, or the UPC code which is located underneath the bar code on all products.

I found another service called Mobsaver that does a price comparison via Amazon or eBay based on an item’s ISBN or UPC number. Unfortunately, I have had some difficulty with Mobsaver because the Sony Ericcson P900 does not like to easily send a text message to an email address. In addition, it would be nice to search based on a specific product name or product category. Hopefully Mobsaver will get an SMS short code setup. If any of you have used Mobsaver or similar services, I would be more than happy to check them out.

Google SMS is pretty cool and has definitely provided some good information at the right time. You can find a little Google SMS cheat sheet for your wallet here. The ONE thing I find lacking with Google SMS is that you cannot query GOOGL to see if your flight is on time or delayed. I spent 3 hours in an airport recently because I did not know that the flight was delayed. I have since discovered that American Airlines will send you a text message if your flight status changes at a predetermined time before your flight takes off. This only applies to AA flights and I’m not sure if other airlines have similar services. While this is good for the traveler, this does not work for the friend or family member circling the airport. Orbitz will allow a passenger to specific 6 contacts to be alerted in case of a late arrival, but that only covers part of the problem.

Google should solve this. I would LOVE to have the ability to know if the flight status changes by asking GOOGL. It would make my life simpler and save me some time. So if the nice engineers in the Googleplex are reading this posting, throw me a bone here! Till then, I will continue to explore the world of Google SMS and pass along my random discoveries.

hpy txtng!