Quick hits for a blustery Wednesday morning:

YouTube sensation (and subject of previous blog post) Tay Zonday has leveraged his Chocolate Rain fame into a deal with Dr. Pepper. and their new specialty (limited time?) beverage “Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper”. His new video, Cherry Chocolate Rain is a high production send-up of the extremely low production original. Not only am I not kidding you about the extremely long product name, I am also serious when I say that the inclusion of cherries and chocolate throughout this video and the fact that they were savvy enough to use Zonday actually makes me want to try a beverage with a 5 word name. (Hat tip to the Catch up Lady)

While Tay Zonday’s lyrics include “this is the web & it’s going to murder your tv”, that won’t be happening in my media integrated household any time soon. In fact, my favorite venue right now is HeyNielsen! For television fans who have never been lucky enough to be included as one of Nielsen’s polling families, this is an opportunity for you to participate in a discussion with the company that tells the networks what the public thinks of their products. All that is required is an opinion and a live email address.  The popularity of topics on the site & what Neilsen “rates” as the top programs have little overlap. For example, Moonlight and its star Alex O’Loughlin are at the top of the actor and show discussions on HeyNielsen!, but the show doesn’t crack the ratings top 20.  I don’t know for sure how all of the buzz insight is being employed, but I hope it is a way to help networks understand which ratings underdogs could become tomorrow’s Seinfeld with a little investment.

My final web love for the day is Scrabulous. While being able to exchange notes, photos, and micro-updates with friends and colleagues on Facebook is wonderful, being able to engage in an intellectual challenge and the corresponding smacktalk makes Facebook even stickier. I don’t have any interest in being “zombied”, but I feel physical glee at being able to play a “Q” against a college roommate across the country. I am evidently in good company - Facebook cites more than 560k active daily users of the application - how’s that for an engagement metric?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 7:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Other posts by Virginia.