AdAge reports on a recent study by BlogHer and Compass Partners that finds "more than one-third (35%) of all women in the U.S. aged 18 to 75 participate in the blogosphere at least once a week."

"I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations."
—Jeff Goldblum

Move over, Google Labs: MSNBC has the pixels cooking with NewsWare about which they say: "We’re always searching for useful and fun ways to enhance and extend the msnbc.com experience."

Whether you like, despise or don’t really care one way or the other about MSNBC, you have to admit they’re doing some pretty interesting stuff. While the Newsbreaker game ran jumpy (and I’m accessing it on FiOS) and the headlines scream by when you get into multiball mode, Newsblaster is a fun spin on Marbles. Both games incorporate news headlines into the game play itself, which makes them appropriate versions of these classics. When you’re done playing, you can customize your own news ticker widget and set up MSNBC on your mobile phone.

The coolest piece of NewsWare, though, is the Spectra Visual Newsreader (screen shot above), which is one of the slickest pieces of Flash you’ll find anywhere these days. You can explore the headlines in a variety of categories as the stories swirl and flip before your eyes. It needs to be tweaked, though, so you can save your settings and go into the Newsreader with one click without having to rebuild your channels each time.

NewsWare is new, but MSNBC is doing a good job of extending their brand and equity into these widgets and activities. Assuming the Web marketers at MSNBC really are "always searching for useful and fun ways to enhance and extend the msnbc.com experience," NewsWare could turn into a real destination site before too long.

Last week I called and ordered FiOS for both my home and the office in my home. That amounted to two separate orders: Internet and phone on one order, television and phone on the other.

In the days that followed, I received multiple emails and phone calls from Verizon both confirming my order and confirming my installation appointment. I was impressed: Where FiOS was concerned, they really seemed to have the customer service thing nailed down tight.

Yesterday, the FiOS installer came by and spent the best part of the day doing the installation. Nice guy. Did a great job and speedtest.net is showing me I’m within reasonable range of the speeds for which I’m paying.

Literally five minutes after the installer left, I get a call from Verizon. "Cool," I think to myself, "they have it nailed down even better than I imagined. They’re calling to see how the installation went."

Nope. They were calling … to sell me FiOS.

Takeaway for marketers: How scrubbed are your phone and email and direct mail lists? Or, put another way: How much of your marketing efforts are pure unadulterated waste?

Over here , Digital Media Wire presents Rohit Bhargava’s list of five influential lists of marketing blogs. It’s an interesting writeup, and I’ve linked to a few of these before, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Oddly enough, though, DMW doesn’t provide links to the lists, so here you go: Todd Andrlik and the Power 150 , Guy Kawasaki and AllTop , Mack Collier and the Viral Garden’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs , Joe Pulizzi and the Junta42 Content Marketing List , and Lee Odden and the Biglist Search Marketing Blogs .

And hey, I don’t want to brag or anything, but on the Power 150? LOHAD happens to be number 543 — and that’s up 13 slots since yesterday! It’s all about the power, baby!