The most bad ass kid ever

Pictured to the right is a bad ass kid.

Nine year-old Drew Heredia was out walking a dog with a female friend when a pitbull ran up and started attacking the girl's dog. When the girl tried to get the pitbull to stop, it started attacking her.

Drew leapt into action...unwilling to allow the ferocious mongrel to continue. He "jumped on the pit bull and applied a choke hold that he learned at a local Brazilian jiu-jitsu studio."

Drew kept the dog in a choke hold until animal control arrived...and the girl and her puppy were safe. They were both taken to the hospital, but are expected to recover. He's my hero. Check out the video below from KGPE:

Steven Johnson is smarter than you...

but don't feel bad. He's smarter than me too.

I first came across his work after he was interviewed in an episode of Radiolab titled "Emergence" (also the title of his phenomenal book on the subject). Radiolab is a radio show from WNYC that delves in scientific, technical, or metaphysical issues in a way I've never, ever encountered. The team that puts it together (Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich) is the perfect combination - Abumrad is a sound engineer and audiophile, Krulwich is an award winning science journalist from ABC. I'm sure I'll blog about them more in the future...suffice it to say they're bad ass.

(listen to a stream of the Emergence episode or download it...you'll be hooked after 5 minutes)

I finished Steven Johnson's book "Everything Bad is Good For You" last month, and it's made for great conversation ever since. He approaches the 'common knowledge' that pop culture is making people stupid (especially TV and video games) and is rotting the brains of our kids.

He starts by taking on TV and engages the reader by suggesting a comparison of the TV shows of today (Lost and 24 are two good examples) to popular TV shows from a couple decades ago (Cheers, Murphy Brown). The sitcoms of yesterday had a predictable layout, a joke at the beginning, a plot that played out among a few key characters, a story arc that followed one story line, and a joke at the end that tied in to the opening scene. Today's shows, in comparison, don't follow just a few characters...they have multiple ongoing sub-plots involving dozens of characters engaged in deep social interactions. Each show ties in to the previous shows in specific ways that only have context in comparison to earlier shows. Even recent comedies (Seinfeld and Simpsons) can be enjoyed again and again, since they have subtle jokes and references that play out the more you repeatedly view the shows.

Even the trash TV of today - reality shows (Survivor, the Apprentice, the Pick Up Artist) should be compared to their equivalent from the recent past - game shows. Compare Survivor to Family Fued, and the added levels of complexity are plainly obvious. Earlier (and even current) game shows give you the rules up front, and have an obvious beginning, middle, and end...but reality shows often don't tell you the rules as the play out, and each successive show build on the previous one.

He starts addressing video games by explaining them to people who may not have played them - pointing that video games of today are not about who can push the buttons as quickly as possible or memorizing button combinations. Games like Pac Man and Asteroids are nothing like the games of today...but not just in terms of how realistic they look. Current games, like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto depend on the player to figure out what the rules are, how to interact with the environment, and how to proceed. It's a much more complicated proposition than simply shooting everything or eating all the power pellets.

Steven Johnson has a new book out this week, and though I haven't bought it yet don't get the wrong idea. The only reason is that I got his earlier book The Ghost Map as a Christmas gift, and I'd like to read that first. He has a blog on the interwebs as well...but don't let the fact that he's on CSPAN or in the New Yorker intimidate you. He's not one of those arrogant intellectuals who use complicated words in the name of precision (when, usually, it's just to show off all the research the author has done or education they've endured) - Johnson is a fantastic writer, and a model for the way nerdy people everywhere should be: pragmatic, approachable, and genuinely interested in the way the world works. Most importantly, he knows how to explain it to the rest of us.

Password strength and Twitter Hacks

I was about to link to this great story (found through boingboing) about the 500 weakest passwords people use (here's a little hint - "123456" and "password" may not be the best to use). You can find the whole list here.

So, this is where I'd planned to go on and on about how awesome boingboing is, when my friend Adam Gilman gave me a heads up on a story on techcrunch. Apparently someone hacked into Rick Sanchez's twitter account (along with Britney Spears and Bill O'Reilly).

Just another cautionary tale: be careful with your passwords or else hilarity will ensue (possibly at your expense).

Marketing to the Social Web

I'm currently reading "Marketing to the Social Web" by Larry Weber...a brief, though comprehensive look at the new applications of marketing on today's internet . The book was written in 2007, which is important as anything over two or three years old feels dated (especially in the realm of social networking, which has only really taken off over the past 4 years or so).

It feels like the most coherent and professional thing I read so far, as relates to such a nascent field. He takes you through all the steps of developing a marketing campaign for the web, and utilizes a few case studies to emphasize the considerations that specific companies would face (as well as how he would choose to go about solving them).

It is these case studies in particular that give you a really great sense of how smart this guy is, and his ability to apply laser-focus to the issues big companies face when trying to take advantage of the immense capability of the internet in general (and social media in particular).

He references successes in advertising on the web, such as the Gillette campaign designed to counter the popularity of the scruffy, unshaven look on guys (see one of the viral videos they posted on the site, which is now, unfortunately, down) as well as failures such as fordboldmoves.com (which has also since been taken down.)

The Ford site, the company proclaimed that it was genuinely looking for customer input to take a bold new direction in the way they do things, and became, in practice, a series of ads with little user input (comments of even the slightest negative or constructive tone were deleted and ignored, and only positives left on the site...leading to its demise.)

Among the most patently obvious (though often ignored) pieces of advice for corporations is this:

As technology and markets evolve, you can't simply create a site and leave it unchanged. If you don't regularly improve the community's benefits on terms that make sense to the members, your site could fade away. Remember Friendster

I was a bit surprised at how tricky it is to find insightful books about marketing on social media (or, actually, anything at all)...but Weber's book has been full of insight. Check it out on Amazon here...or wait for the second edition, slated to come out next month. He also has a website related to the book. Do you have any suggestions on other insightful books to read? Leave me a comment!

Nerdiness and Skill

Some people love video games so much that they feel the urge to do something to make them better. Video Game platform emulators (ways to make your computer work like an old school NES or Sony Dreamcast) were invented by people just like this.

It is the rare occasion when nerdy interest in video games actually intersects with genuine skill at something else. Such is the case with Andrea Vadrucci and his drumming ability. This guy from Italy has written and performed drum tracks for the classic Super Mario Bros. series of games...and the performances are amazing.

He just posted his rendition of Super Mario 3 (embedded below) but his entire catalog can be listened to on YouTube as well as MySpace. I particularly like what he did with the Barber of Seville

Top tech flops of 2008

Found this article through a link on Asylum...a fun place to breeze through occasionally fun and interesting content.

It's a list of the top tech flops of 2008...included are the painful demise of E3, and (uh-oh) the hologram on CNN. That hologram got so much hype and free press - I think it was worth it. Not to mention, the rumor is that they got it for free, since the Israeli company that created the technology was willing to provide the infrastructure to "beam people in" to New York wanted the publicity.

In the interest of full disclosure, I work at CNN on the National desk.

Check out the link below to see what else made the list:

http://www.switched.com/2008/12/31/top-tech-flops-of-2008/

New year, new number?

Something brief and nerdy trivia for ya while you watch football, nurse your hangover, or just relax (or, if you're in news like me...working in the newsroom).

The new year marks the use of a new number on our calendars, but did you know there are such thing as "illegal numbers?" Yes, in the United States.

It sounds like a communistic concept, but it exists for a couple reasons. for one example, HD and Blu-Ray DVDs are encoded using a process that requires both the DVD and the player to be able to communicate and ensure that you're using the genuine article. Hackers figured out what that number was, so that they could make free copies of HD and Blu-Ray DVDs and distribute them online. They even created the flag shown to the right to tell people what it is (The code for the color values in the flag combines to create the number). Eventually, DVD equipment manufacturers and DVD makers had to change the number because it'd been publicized.

You may be wondering: what's the number? Well, it's normally shown in hexadecimal (or Base 16 for the math inclined) but in standard decimal notation the number is:

13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640

Another example is in the instance of child porn. Digital files, including pictures, are just a series of zeroes and ones...so if you have child porn images on your computer, you are in possession of an illegal numbers (and you deserve to be shot in the crotch and bled out until dead).

Here's more info on illegal numbers, and the DVD encryption key discussed above.