Personal Dork Assistant

Internet Famous

I don't know who decided having everyone introducing all their products, in one place, all at once was a good idea, but the Consumer Electronics Show is now that occasion and the monster's out of control. There are the big-name conglomerates throwing out TVs, camcorders, cameras, and laptops by the dozen, all named with inscrutable alphanumeric strings. Then there's Intel promising faster chips, promising Nokia more cell phones for everybody, and Microsoft promising not much of anything new (Engadget: "And... that's it? Wow. Incredibly boring. Incredibly incredibly boring. Really."). As the tide of rumors about the yet-non-existent Apple products threatens to steal the show.

A major theme at CES recently, even more so now with the semi-demise of the Macworld show, is the explosion of accessories and add-ons for the iPod ecosystem. But even with the dedicated coverage of sites like iLounge, the never-ending arrays of speakers, docks, headphones, and cases do get old after a while, and it takes a real unique product to stand out.

Parrot had managed to break through the clutter once before with their premium Philip Starck-designed floor-standing dock-speakers. But in the end it's just another set of speakers and one's attention moves on quickly to the next new thing. However, their big CES reveal of the AR. Drone remote-controlled helicopter is perfectly designed to capture the imagination of any iPhone wielding male. What big-boy wouldn't want an iPhone-piloted hovering quad-copter with built-in video cam, streaming live-view pictures back to the iPhone screen? It was certainly impressive enough for the hardened cynics at Engadget to proclaim "we're already lined up and we're not worrying about the cost."

Even with all the gadget blogs, it's still impossible for one team to cover everything at CES, not to mention singular mainstream journalists. Even as the pseudo-all-knowing tech-columnist of the New York Times, David Pogue is still just one man amongst the sea of CES press-releases. So when I saw his favorites-of-CES on CNBC featured something as mundane as custom earbud covers made from earhole photos, I couldn't resist shooting him a tweet about the AR Drone. To my surprise, he quickly replied.

chungiwang: @Pogue Come on, iPhone-controlled wifi-enabled surveillance mini-copter couldn't beat out icky earhole pictures? http://j.mp/5N6gWq>

Pogue: DANG! definitely does. Never saw it.

Then he fired off a new tweet to his 1,304,619 followers:

Pogue: iPhone-controlled quadricopter with video-eye-view... too damn cool! http://bit.ly/7O1vPa (via @chungiwang)

Like a good journalist should, the story was properly attributed to moi, and he left enough slack in the tweet to allow the entire text, including @-attributions, to be re-tweeted by others. And soon thereafter, references of Pogue's tweet, and my name, began to pop up all over the Twitter-verse.

Yeah, it's a vanity ego-boost that means nothing in the real world. But after industriously tweeting away in my own little corner to an uncaring world for months on end it's kinda cool to experience the power of the real-time-web communication's network effect in action, even just in a slight reflection of its full extent. Although to be fair it's not my first brush with celebrity-twits, having gotten a public reply from The Sports Guy (a.k.a. @sportsguy33, 1,144,934 followers) before. I think it's because of time-zone reasons my replies come near US midnight time, as they do their final Twit-checks and other followers have gone to bed, so I have a slightly better chance of breaking through the tweet-noise.