… for these may be the coolest cell phones of tomorrow.

It’s a lot easier to find a good Podcast about tech or music than it is to find one about marketing. I’m still waiting for the marketing version of TWIT. Meanwhile, Internet Marketing Voodoo is well worth a listen.

Each episode is focused on a specific topic, such as Marketing to Women Online or Business Blogging. There are 18 installments in all so far, with the pace of new episodes running at about one a week.

How do great brands stand out? Here’s a blog and a site and a book that thinks they have the answer. I like what the brands link of their site could have been: Choose a brand from the dropdown menu and get a pithy assessment of why the brand is unique. Instead, the site delivers mostly bland factoids, like this one for Snapple:

“Snapple started as a juice drink with fizz — the original name came from a carbonated apple soda. Now the Snapple line has over 30 flavors, including teas, juice drinks, and lemonade.”

Why not deliver some real opinion here? For that matter, why not make a chapter or two available for free download? It’s a very attractive site, and the authors have some heavyweight experience behind them. Too bad they didnt take the online expression of their book a step or two further.

Suddenly, Whyville is popping up all over my radar. A recommendation from a colleague. This article in Adotas. Today’s article in C|Net. The timing certainly seems right for a MySpace alternative that’s safe for kids, though the site seems to be more like NeoPets than MySpace. There are sites like this one for Whyville cheats (always a good measure of a site’s viability) and trusted brands like Adobe and the J. Paul Getty Trust are involved … but something’s not quite passing the smell test.

This Virtual Worlds Review page on Whyville says the site launched in 1999, and was averaging 22,000 visitors a day in 2003. But the site itself looks like it was designed in 1999, with not much attention paid to the look since then. The current flurry of articles about Whyville seems to be the first news generated by the site in several years, which makes me wonder: Is piggybacking on the MySpace furor to get stories a last gasp for breath before shuttering the site? And when you go to visit the site of the company that launched Whyville, you’re taken to what appears to be a keyword advertising link farm. Hmmmmm.

JUNE 16 UPDATE: Be sure to click on the comments link below. I appreciate Whyville CEO Jim Bower taking the time to post. His note begs this takeaway for marketers, too: DNS issues can make you look really bad.

Opinmind is an interesting site that attempts to track opinions expressed in blogs. Search for “vegetables” and you’ll find that bloggers like veggies by a margin of 2 to 1, according to the Opinmind “sentimeter”(tm).

How accurate is the sentimeter(tm)? I’ll report, you decide:

In the world of news and punditry, the sentimeter(tm) delivered the following positive ratings numbers: 67% to The Drudge Report, 61% to Fox News, 58% to the New York Times, 47% to MSNBC, 45% to CNN, 37% to Sean Hannity and 26% to Rush Limbaugh.

In the world of music, the sentimeter(tm) gave out the following positive ratings numbers: 92% to Frank Sinatra, 92% to Elvis Costello, 90% to Van Morrison, 86% to Eric Clapton, 86% to The Beatles, 85% to Billy Joel and 78% to Bruce Springsteen.

Not bad on the face of it. But what about these: Positive ratings of 78% to Yanni, 77% to Britney Spears and 47% to Ann Coulter.

This is telling, though: In the Coulter search results, blog posts like “we have to endure the words of a hatemonger like Ann Coulter” and “I don’t like Ann Coulter because she’s a deliberate bomb-thrower” were posts determined to be positive. If you’re her book publisher, I suppose they are.

Opinmind is a great idea (with a 100% positive sentimeter(tm) rating, by the way), but they have some work to do before it becomes a truly useful tool.