All Things Digital

Ah, more pointless eye candy from BoomTown’s good friends at Facebook!

Not satisfied to just entertain the masses with inane Vampires and SuperPokes, the social-networking site unleashed Lexicon on users this week.

It’s kind of like Google Zeitgeist except… well, it is exactly the same concept, all part of Facebook’s admiration of Google (GOOG) things, like, for example, as many of its employees as it can entice away.

As Facebook’s Roddy Lindsay described it: “We thought it would be cool to show trends on the public and semi-public forums across Facebook (also known as Walls). Today we’re announcing the launch of Facebook Lexicon, a tool where you can see the buzz surrounding different words and phrases on Facebook Walls.”

But, as much as I hate a lot of these juvenile time-wasters online, I do like the very simple Lexicon very much, especially in its ability to compare up to five keywords or two-word phrases at once.

Thus, BoomTown is periodically going to post word comparisons here, always using Britney Spears as the control word, since she has been a perennial champ on Zeitgeist for a very long time.

So, today, it is presidential candidates–Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain.

As you can see, among users of Facebook, Britney holds up surprisingly well, even though she is going through a quieter, less-manic-head-shaving period of late.

(Click to make the images bigger)

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

I stopped on by Google’s Zeitgeist yesterday to say hello to Washington Post CEO and Chairman Don Graham, who was attending the search giant’s annual confab of powermongers, where they talk about big issues and mostly engage in Olympic schmoozing.

I had used my old boss Graham to make a point about the immature nature of Facebook apps in a post Tuesday. (He had sent me a digital “Hot Potato” that prompted my diatribe, so I wanted to make sure he knew it was not personal that I was not tossing it back or wherever one was supposed to toss one.)

Zeitgeist sessions are off the record, although it was crawling with press, including bigwigs like Graham and New York Times head Arthur Sulzberger Jr., as well as a spate of other movers and shakers like (Google favorite) former Vice President Al Gore.

So, given the restrictions, I decided to use my visit to further my ongoing quest to ask Web players about what’s new and what’s hyped. While there, I put the screws to longtime Internet serial entrepreneur Yossi Vardi (ICQ among others) and also Dow Jones Online President Gordon McLeod in what is a very short video.

Here it is:

Yesterday, we slapped around VC Fred Wilson in our ongoing efforts to overtake him in our increasingly annoying journey to extract donors and dollars from geeks for a charity called DonorsChoose.org.

It’s working! We’re now hovering near $10,000 with 35 donors and solidly in the No. 2 slot, although Wilson does march on like Sherman to the sea with $16,566 and 61 donors.

So go now and to click on through to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here or use the thermometer on the left side of this page to give early and often!

We are nearing the halfway point of the October Tech Blogger Challenge for DonorsChoose.org, which funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors. AllThingsD picked tech projects in both San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Besides raising funds for kids who need it, we also hope to win an award Yahoo is sponsoring for the tech blogger who garners the biggest number of donors–a free lunch with CEO Jerry Yang! And it must be ours!

Thus, it’s time for a Web celebrity endorsement! So, here’s Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, which recently got into a little bit of controversy when one of its top execs said they’d never pay their bloggers!

Well, I didn’t pay her either and absolutely did not hand her her lines at all–except, well, all of them.

Although New York Times poobah Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who was passing by when I was making the video at Google’s Zeitgeist event yesterday, did jokingly chastise me for telling her what to say, it was actually the whole point of egregious fund-raising tactics. (But thanks, Arthur, for keeping me honest!)

So, remember to click on through to our AllThingsD page on DonorsChoose.org here to give early and often!

And here’s the video: