That’s right, it’s the 10th season* of South Park and the adventures of Eric, Kyle, Stan and Kenny! Making fun of pop trends, celebrities, politics and religion, Matt Stone and Trey Parker have been on the cutting edge of cultural parody for a full decade. So what could be a better way to celebrate a big birthday than to offer all your friends free games …and a personality test? Yep, over at South Park’s online home at comedycentral.com you can take the test and learn which main character you most resemble. You can even copy the code provided in the results page and post the animated “badge” on your site.

One million people visit comedycentral.com each month on average, and 69,000 visited the South Park main page in September. The site is the digital locker for all things South Park. For game players, there’s the South Park 10 Games – four are ready now with more on the way. For true fanatics who want to take the crew with them, there is the Trivia Probe – a daily SMS game available to VirginMobile subscribers. Or if you have Cingular or T-Mobile, you can buy South Park ringtones and wallpaper including my favorite Deputy Cartman (“respect my authoritah!”).

The Fall season opened with several more hilarious episodes. As usual the boys overcome evil and stupidity while learning important lessons, and of course Kenny dies. The drama is heavy and, as long as you are not politically correct or easily offended, great for lots of laughs. There’s more good news too — the creators have at least two more seasons planned after this one is over!

*It’s actually the second half of the tenth season – the show is different in many, many ways including being launched in Spring as opposed to Fall like most TV programs.

Get SnapShot’s of sites mentioned in this post:

• comedycentral.com

When I first saw the advertising for the Motorola Q, I had the feeling it was going to be a hit. I also thought the Palm Treo was in big trouble.

The first prediction wasn’t a real stretch, and I ended up being right. Thin and feature-packed is clearly a recipe for success. As far as smartphones go, the Q’s launch was a tremendous success. At its high point in early June of this year, almost 20% of Verizon handset researchers looked at the Q online. For context, the only other smartphone to break through even the 5% interest level this year at Verizon was the XV6700, a Verizon branded UTStarcom device, which peaked at 6.1% in mid-January.

It looks like the Q is attracting more than just office drones too. Consumers interested in the Q were primarily comparing it to multimedia phones. A smartphone with strong multimedia appeal that garnered the highest level of overall shopper interest this year…..perhaps it was a true crossover product?

In July and August, consumers shopping the Q were also shopping the Motorola RAZR, Samsung SCH-a990 and SCH-a930, and LG VX8300. With its launch in August, another multimedia phone, the LG Chocolate immediately became the phone most cross-shopped by Q shoppers. Of course, the Chocolate is highly shopped in general (maybe more on this in a later post) so that came as no real surprise.

Treo shoppers, on the other hand, are sticking with e-mailed enabled phones and mostly considered other Treos and smartphones. An average of 2.2% of Verizon handset researchers looked at each of the Treo models each month.

This was starting to make sense. I know I had considered the Treo - it’s the clear smartphone winner in our office market share contest. But I always thought it was too bulky and was holding out for something better. Consistent with my past technology upgrade experiences, I was rewarded for waiting - along came the Q. Being a researcher I read the reviews and cornered some early buyers I knew to get their opinions. Despite its lack of a touch screen and a Palm OS, I was still sold on the Q’s overall package and ended up buying. Meanwhile, Palm issued a press release earlier this month – their revenue was going to be short of earlier guidance “primarily due to lower Treo volumes in carrier retail channels.” I guess I’m not the only one comparing the two and going with the Q.

After a somewhat restful Labor Day weekend, it’s time to get back to work! To follow up to our last post of August 23rd on Search market share, we are happy to make our data available for August 2006.

Interesting Notes:

* Since August of 2005 Google has improved its Search market share 12 consecutive months.

* Although Google is enjoying a nice uninterrupted trend, its August gain represents its smallest market share increase of the year.

* Overall the Search landscape was relatively stable across Yahoo, MSN and ASK with no one property gaining or losing more than two tenths of a percent.

Compete’s market share report is based on the volume of ‘web searches’ conducted on each Search property - which excludes dedicated image, video and news searches. Compete will make its Search Market Share data available at the beginning of each month, so check back in October to see if Google can continue the climb.