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!

What is a web comic? Its like a regular comic, except it’s hosted online and generally does not follow a strict release schedule. They also differ in that they tend to be larger than regular comics taking up 3, 6, or 9 comic panels. The art is usually hand drawn and scanned, or made using clip art (more on this later).

The most common type of web comic would be the comic strip designed to draw laughs. One of my favorites for its very biting jokes is Perry Bible Fellowship, although some might find these a bit too biting - one of the things that makes the medium popular is its ability to cross boundaries of political correctness most printed comics would not be able to do.

Many blogs host political web comics. They generally appear on partisan blogs, or on candidate’s websites. Some of them espouse a conservative view such as Cox and Forkum or a liberal one such as This Modern World.

There is a new kind of DIY clipart style comic that is growing in popularity because it allows people to comment creatively without being an artist. Get Your War On is an example of one. Here the comic writer uses tools that make it is easy to make one’s own web comics. You can make your own web comics too: using this great “Comic Strip Generator” all you have to do is be creative!

Was on the site of Edward Tufte, the author of the stunning series of books about data and its visualization — The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is the first in the series — looking up info about his new book, Beautiful Evidence. Was especially intriqued by his notion of Sparklines. An example is below:

This picture depicts four vital signs over time, with the grey bar representing the normal range and the red dots and numbers the latest readings. It’s an elegant and economical way to provide time-series data, and to easily see and know when data diverges from the normal or target ranges. His new book will have a home on my shelf very soon.

There’s a link on his site to a fascinating applet that turns any web site into a graph. The graph depicts the tags (or links) in the site. See legend here. Here’s a screenshot of what this blog looks like as a graph:

As uncovered by my colleague, Matt Wood, the ball of dots on the right represent the major portion of the blog; the bottom left-hand corner of dots is the Archive side bar; the blue ball with green center to the left is the Tag Cloud.

The site provides graphs for a number of popular sites (scroll down.) You can add any URL to the applet and watch the graph reveal itself. There is also a collection of such graphs on Flickr here.

At The Bivings Group, we care a lot about site design, user navigation and site effectiveness. Such graphing tools help push the frontiers of our knowledge.

Along with it’s list of 50 People Who Matter Now, Business 2.0 has also released its list of 10 People Who Don’t Matter.

The former corporate A-listers include:

• Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft
• Jeffrey Citron, Chairman & Chief Strategist, Vonage
• Reed Hastings, CEO Netfix
• Ken Kutaragi, President, Sony Computer Entertainment
• Warren Lieberfarb, Senior Consultant, HD-DVD Promotion Group
• Rob Malda, Slashdot.org
• Arun Sarin, CEO, Vodafone
• Jon Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems
• Linus Torvalds, Creator, Linux
• Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook

Business 2.0 editors said that this list was composed of, ”people whose power had peaked, whose influence had waned, or whose true importance we felt was overstated.” 

Here’s to the hope that those executive perks help ease the sting of having the media inform you (and everyone else in the world) that you don’t really matter.

Our study on Internet usage by 2006 U.S. Senate campaigns got a nice write up on the excellent PBS MediaShift blog today. The article focuses on the use of tools like blogs and podcasts by the campaigns. It’s a good read.

For those of you interested, here’s a listing of our series of posts the last few months on this topic:

• The Internet’s Role in Political Campaigns
• Best 2006 Campaign Websites
• 2006 Campaign Blog Review
• 2006 Senate Blog Review…The Sequel
• Politicians Who Podcast
• Most “Web 2.0″ Politicians

A couple of days ago the Financial Times reported that MySpace was planning to go global, launching non-English localized versions of MySpace in 11 countries sometime this summer. Countries named at being potential targets included the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and India. MySpace currently has around 75 million registered users (it increases by the second).

Will it work?

I personally think MySpace is going to have to battle tooth and nail for users in each country. Many countries already have local social networks that are growing in popularity by the day. As an example, a social network called Orkut is already hugely popular in Brazil. According to the New York Times, 11 million Brazilians have Orkut accounts. To put that in perspective, around 12 million Brazilians are believed to use the Internet from home. I suspect many of the countries MySpace is targeting will have competitors in place that have some degree of traction already.

The battle will be won by the network that quickly get the most users in each country, creating a situation where users have to be a certain social network because that is where all their friends are congregating online. Be interesting to watch what happens.

First seen on TechCrunch.

I didn’t realize that the U.S. was such a laggard when it came to the deployment of broadband Internet access. See chart below, courtesy of the International Telecommunications Union. We’re 16th on the list of the top 20 economies, one-half Korea’s rate, and just under Liechtenstein’s.

Not very impressive; perhaps reflects a real need for policy to spur more investment and competition in the telecommunications sector. Wonder just how the debate over net-neutrality will affect our position in this chart over the coming years.

Netscape has just entered the news aggregator business, launching the beta version of a news site that mimics the model of sites like Digg and Newsvine. These sites rely on users to vote on the stories they like and use this data to create the equivalent of a newspaper homepage, highlighting the most popular stories as voted on by readers.

If you are interested, you can read a full analysis of the differences between Digg and Netscape’s new product here.

My first thought after spending a little time on the Netscape beta is that I like it. I am a fan of Digg, but it is too tech-focused for most people. Netscape’s tool has something for everyone: there are channels devoted to celebrity gossip, shopping, gadgets and politics. Most of the topics people are interested in are covered, so in theory the Netscape site could serve all your needs.

It is worth a look.