Here’s the link to article posted on Newser, which contains the video clip as well.

You will get a laugh at how dated it seems…crazy that it was only 16 years ago!! Enjoy

Rodney Bradford is a Brooklyn teen who was accused of a robbery that took place on October 17 and was held on Riker’s Island for 12 days!!!

Turns out that Bradley had been wrongly identified at the scene by a “witness” who claimed to see him there. In fact, he was at his father’s home in Harlem – nowhere near where the robbery took place in the Farragut section of Brooklyn. Even other, multiple witnesses coming forward to say they saw Rodney at his father’s wasn’t enough to clear him from being a suspect.

It was only thanks to a status update on Facebook, “Where my IHOP?” that they were able to trace Bradley’s electronic “fingerprint” back to his dad’s computer back in Harlem.

The family is taking the position that Facebook saved Rodney. Pretty scary. Robert Reuland, Bradford’s attorney said it well…”It reflects the pervasiveness that Web sites and social networking has on our lives.”

You can read the story in its entirety as it appeared in the New York post by clicking here.

A recent tweet from @shitmydadsays

Click here for a great example of true viral marketing – this sent to me courtesy of Mutt Media fan Jen Gruber. I turned her on to twitter.com/shitmydadsays and she’s been hooked. Read the article and see how Twitter really can work to your advantage when your content is good.

You should follow @shitmydadsays (twitter.com/shitmydadsays) on Twitter to get a good laugh whenever he posts.

You can also follow Jen @jgru (twitter.com/jgru)

For the purpose of the study, a media creator is someone who created a blog or webpage ,posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations. Most have done two or more of these activities. One-third of teens share what they create online with others, 22 percent have their own websites, 19 percent blog, and 19 percent remix online content…some interesting statistics…

Here’s a piece that my son made awhile back that at last count had almost 90,000 hits on YouTube. Go figure. Topic? Call of Duty and his Top 10 Weapons. Kids these days!

Interesting, so take a look and consider how you are getting your information and ask yourself, “Is this the best resource?” Consider the timeliness of data collection and reporting the next time you go looking to “Google”.

Clive Thompson on How the Real-Time Web Is Leaving Google Behind
By Clive Thompson 09.21.09

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, millions of people flooded onto Google News to find the latest information about what had happened. The spike in traffic was so massive that Google suspected a malware attack and began blocking anyone searching for “Michael Jackson.”

It’s a funny story, but it illustrates how the Web is changing. People increasingly turn to the Internet for up-to-the-minute information about, well, everything—blog postings about celebrity antics, status updates from friends, and pictures and videos of political events as they unfold, like the protests over the Iranian election. Studies have shown that these types of search requests are on the rise.

Pundits call it the real-time Web. It’s upending the Internet as we’ve known it, and it’s not something that Google can easily dominate.

For more than 10 years, Google has organized the Web by figuring out who has authority. The company measures which sites have the most links pointing to them—crucial votes of confidence—and checks to see whether a site grew to prominence slowly and organically, which tends to be a marker of quality. If a site amasses a zillion links overnight, it’s almost certainly spam.

But the real-time Web behaves in the opposite fashion. It’s all about “trending topics”—zOMG a plane crash!—which by their very nature generate a massive number of links and postings within minutes. And a search engine can’t spend days deciding what is the most crucial site or posting; people want to know immediately.

So a new generation of search engines like Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Topsy, Scoopler, and Collecta are trying to redefine what makes a piece of information important.

Some of these sites offer a Digg-like indexed front page that displays hot topics, while others just include a simple search field. But most of them rely heavily on Twitter. When a burst of tweets citing a particular subject or URL emerges, it’s a “signaling event,” as Rishab Ghosh of Topsy puts it. To make sure they’re not just getting hoodwinked by spammers, these new search engines employ some clever tricks, like crawling tweeted URLs and discarding those that land on sites containing spamlike language. Most disregard Twitter users who behave like spambots—for example, ones that follow thousands of people but have very few followers themselves.

Other ploys abound. OneRiot has a toolbar that lets users flag an interesting post immediately. Collecta actively imports blog posts and tweets so they appear in search results less than a second after they go live, rather than the hours it can take regular search engines to catalog the same info. “We want to be limited only by the speed of light,” Collecta CTO Jack Moffitt jokes.

The result is something curiously different from regular searching. If you hunt for “Michael Jackson” on a traditional engine like Ask.com or Bing, the vast majority of the links remain the same day to day. Authority changes slowly on the “old” Web. But real-time search engines deliver different, updated results almost every time.

The creators of these new engines argue that their goal isn’t to answer questions— à la Google—but to organize experience into a keyhole glimpse of what the world is doing at this very moment. “It’s exactly what your friends are going to be talking about when you get to the bar tonight,” OneRiot executive Tobias Peggs says. “That’s what we’re finding.” Google settles arguments; real-time search starts them.

Edo Segal, a pioneer in real-time search, thinks the field is going to explode as updates become more automatic, with our devices autoreporting where we are, how we’re feeling, and what we’re doing and seeing. Old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment. “Google organized our memory,” Segal says. “Real-time search organizes our consciousness.”