Hola Sofia Vergara!

In an interesting brand extension, the popular celebrity and entertainment site Wonderwall has launched a version aimed at the U.S. Hispanic market called Wonderwall Latino.

The main Wonderwall site, which is a partnership between Hollywood production company BermanBraun and Microsoft’s MSN portal that launched in early 2009, now has 11.3 million unique users and 337 million page views a month.

That site is getting a design overhaul, with new features including voting buttons, a dedicated video page and a buzz stream with breaking news and tweets, as well as apps for the Apple iPhone and IPod Touch.

According to an MSN blog on the Wonderwall extension, “BermanBraun will spearhead the design, programming, and operations of the digital brand. MSN will provide unique content and lead the advertising efforts in partnership with Microsoft and BermanBraun.”

BermanBraun also recently debuted a political site called BLTWY with MSNBC.com.

But you may still end up watching the awards or find yourself in conversation with someone who cares about them. Or just making small talk, or whatever.

So here are a couple of data points you can bruit about, if you’d like. They come via Nielsen, which is trying to measure online “buzz” about the films and actors up for awards.

What is “buzz”? In this case, Nielsen is monitoring user-generated chatter about the Oscars over the last month. Whether it’s Twitter, blog comments, discussion boards, etc. Note that Nielsen is just reporting on volume here, not sentiment. So it’s possible that many of the people talking about “Avatar” hate it.

But they are talking about it, more than anything else (see chart below; click to enlarge).

Go ahead and draw your own conclusions. Mine: Not at all interesting that “Avatar” is generating chatter since it’s the most popular–or at least the highest-grossing–movie of all time. But barely anyone has seen “The Hurt Locker”–at least compared with, say, “The Blind Side.” So that’s interesting. Right?

And here’s Nielsen’s assessment of the Best Actor and Best Actress categories:

Again, many more people saw George Clooney saunter in and out of airports than saw Jeff Bridges getting drunk, so that means…I don’t know. Maybe they’re talking about Jeff Bridges because all the Oscar TV shows and articles are predicting a win for Jeff Bridges. That would make sense, right?

Meanwhile, an update on the three million New York-area TV watchers who may not be able to watch the Oscars on ABC if Disney (DIS) and Cablevision (CVC) can’t work out their spat: There is no update.

At the moment the two companies are still sending out press releases that are supposed to be incendiary. But they are, in fact, very dull.

This chart, from video-tracking service TubeMogul, doesn’t prove or disprove YouTube’s claim. But it does give you a good sense of where the “short tail” of YouTube’s videos–its most popular stuff–comes from.

To tease it out further, I asked the TubeMogul folks what percent of YouTube’s top videos actually had ads, of any sort, on them. The answer: All of the YouTube “partner/professional” clips–which makes sense. And then another 1.79 percent of the user-generated videos. In other words, 63.28 percent of YouTube’s top videos are entirely ad-free.

Better than the old days, when the site had no ads at all. But it might explain why even though Google (GOOG) is optimistic about YouTube’s chances, the search engine has “yet to realize significant revenue benefits,” as the company pointed out in its most recent quarterly filing.

Here’s a video from YouTube’s most popular offerings that remains unmonetized. Though it seems it would be no problem to get an insurance company to sign on for this one.

*Always good when you get to praise the boss’s idea in public. Even better when you mean it, as in this case.

During a call with analysts Thursday to discuss second-quarter earnings, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin said the app, which is currently the iTune App Store’s fourth most popular app in the music category and the 88th most popular overall, was intended more as a means of tempering subscriber churn than a means of driving new subscriptions.

“…unlike an awful lot of applications on the iPhone…we’re not offering free service,” Karmazin said. “What we are offering is the free download and a week’s trial, so this was never designed that we believe we were going to get a significant number of new subscribers. We are seeing an increase in the number of subscribers who are signing up for the $2.99 fee, to be able to stream the product in addition to having it, so a satellite radio subscriber who also has an iPhone is now able to do that with an incremental $2.99.”

So the app is bringing in some new revenue. How much isn’t clear though, since Sirius doesn’t break iPhone app numbers (subscribers or revenue) out. Karmazin admits, however, that it’s not much. “You should not consider them to be a very significant number related to our number of subscribers,” he said, adding, “It’s the right thing for us to do, we continue to believe in it, we’ll continue to do more of these things.”

During a call with analysts Thursday to discuss second-quarter earnings, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin said the app, which is currently the iTune App Store’s fourth most popular app in the music category and the 88th most popular overall, was intended more as a means of tempering subscriber churn than a means of driving new subscriptions.

“…unlike an awful lot of applications on the iPhone…we’re not offering free service,” Karmazin said. “What we are offering is the free download and a week’s trial, so this was never designed that we believe we were going to get a significant number of new subscribers. We are seeing an increase in the number of subscribers who are signing up for the $2.99 fee, to be able to stream the product in addition to having it, so a satellite radio subscriber who also has an iPhone is now able to do that with an incremental $2.99.”

So the app is bringing in some new revenue. How much isn’t clear though, since Sirius doesn’t break iPhone app numbers (subscribers or revenue) out. Karmazin admits, however, that it’s not much. “You should not consider them to be a very significant number related to our number of subscribers,” he said, adding, “It’s the right thing for us to do, we continue to believe in it, we’ll continue to do more of these things.”

“Reaching more than 1 million downloads so quickly is a strong testament to our world-class programming and Sirius XM’s instant brand recognition,” Scott Greenstein, president and chief content officer, said in a release trumpeting the milestone. “Our goal is to give people access to the best audio entertainment wherever they go with what we think is the best music and audio entertainment application available on the App Store.”

The app, which debuted on June 18, quickly became the top free offering in the the App Store’s music category and has held that spot for some time now. So it’s certainly one of the more popular music apps available. That said, it’s also one of the most poorly rated. Sirius XM’s app has an average rating of just two stars out of a possible five. Of its 56,952 user reviews, just 8,822 give it five stars. But 37,818 rate it a single star. And most of those do so citing Stern’s absence as the reason. So while it’s true that Sirius XM Premium Online is the the top free app in the music category, it’s also seems to be its leading disappointment. Makes you wonder how many of those one million downloads were deleted, either after the user noticed Stern’s absence or the $2.99/month subscription fee.

More than six million downloads by Microsoft (MSFT) Windows users? That means that Safari 4, at least at the outset, is more popular on Windows than on the Mac.

Now, the former’s installed base is significantly larger, I know. But still…. Clearly, Apple’s (AAPL) 2007 decision to suggest Safari to Windows users via the iTunes software update has done great things to boost usage on that platform. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs said when Safari for Windows was first announced:

How are we going to distribute [Safari for Windows]? We don’t really talk to these customers, do we? There are over 500,000 downloads of Firefox a day. What are we going to do? Well, it turns out, there are over 1 million downloads of iTunes a day. As a matter of fact, there have been over a half a billion downloads of iTunes to Windows Machines. Over half a billion. And so we know how to reach these customers and we are going to do exactly that.

And successfully, too.