Google today announced on their blog that any site can embed a +1 button on their site. This button will bring a certain amount of socialness to search results. Just head on over to this site to grab the code to drop onto your webpage.

After I put the +1 button on one of my websites (no link, official announcement coming soon) and noticed it on another site I was on, I became curious how many sites already have the +1 button setup? Is there a way that I can search for the javascript code that is used to insert the button?

I have learned a little bit about search engine optimization (SEO) because I’m nerdy like that. The fact that Google, the most popular search engine, is starting to offer a “recommend” button throws a wrench in everything. How will they account for the +1 score in search results? Does this immediately become more important than any other SEO tactics? Let’s see what the SEO gurus have to say in a couple months … (or check out this Quora answer for insight)

This quiet announcement without any fanfare is very sly of Google. This is a big deal, but they decided to downplay it. Why?

This question was posted to Quora. I’ll let you know if I receive a good answer.

This is Part 2 in the Into to Hacking series. Check out Part 1 for additional hacker stories and come back soon for a more technical look at common hacking methods.

Phone Phreaks
Some of the earliest hackers were phone phreaks, dating all the way back to the 1950′s – they took advantage of their knowledge of how phone systems work to do some pretty cool things.

Switch-hooking: making outgoing phone calls by rapidly picking up and hanging up the phone (5-10 times a second) to mimic a rotary dial. If you were good enough you could impress your friends by dialing without pressing any numbers!

Tone dialing: certain tones were used by the phone company which had a specific meaning to the call routing system, such as 2600 Hz to designate that a call was over. This knowledge could be exploited to provide free long-distance and international calls. It was first discovered in 1957 by a seven-year old blind kid with perfect pitch – he whistled the fourth E above middle C (2600 Hz) while on the phone and the call abruptly ended. The legendary John Draper also discovered that the free whistles in Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes also made the same tone (hence his nickname Captain Crunch), while still others used exotic birds or learned the distinct whistle themselves.

Blue boxes: as the systems became more complex, so did the hackers’ techniques. Blue boxes were fairly simple contraptions built to take advantage of some of the phreak knowledge and caught the attention of the young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. As you might expect, Woz was the main engineer and Stevie wanted to sell them and dominate the world. One famous demo of their device involved Woz calling the Pope pretending to be Harry Kissinger …

Free Porsche!
Radio stations love giving things away Keep reading…

There has been a lot of buzz recently around the possibility that Coke’s secret formula has finally been revealed to the public. Is it true? Does it matter?

Did you know only two Coca-Cola executives are allowed to know the recipe for creating the sugary syrup that goes into Coke? And that those two execs aren’t allowed to fly on the same plane for fear that it may crash and the formula will be lost forever?

But don’t think Coca-Cola is unique. There are similar stories for Dr. Pepper’s 23 flavors, KFC’s blend of 11 herbs and spices, and many others. Did you know KFC’s 11 herbs and spices are mixed at two different locations and then combined at a third so that the mixers don’t learn the formula?

Does it actually matter? I love all the secrecy, but I hate to break it to you, Coke isn’t successful because of their product. It’s their brand. It’s their advertising. It’s the memories.

And Coke knows this. All the secrecy is good publicity, so they aren’t about to publish the formula in the New York Times. But they know their true assets. As any good product manager knows, it is not all about the product.
 

• Snopes.com on the Coke secret formula
• ABC news on the possibility of the formula recently released. Check out the second page for other food industry secrets and rumors.

Photo: Morgan

Fan fiction is an absolutely fascinating cultural phenomenon. These are the people that sit down and write anywhere from a chapter to multiple books in the world crafted by an existing fictional work. When they can make any world they can possibly imagine, why would they limit themselves to a world they previously read about? Sure, I can understand how a few people could be into this, there are some ridiculous hobbies out there. But it is much bigger than that. Way bigger. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Harry Potter is by far the most popular book world for extension into fan fiction and fanfiction.net is the most popular site for “authors” to post their stories. So let’s check out their HP section. There are over a half million stories in over 20 languages! But taking a closer look, many of these are not short stories involving a character or two. They are full on books even longer than the original Harry Potter books!

There are 1,084,170 words in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling spread over 7 books. If we define a book as over 100,000 words (similar in size to the first couple HP books), there are over 4,000 on fanfiction.net in English alone! And 62 of those are longer than half of the entire series. Can’t get enough Harry Potter? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more out there for you to check out.

What else is fascinating? Most authors of fan fiction release chapters as they write them. I am intrigued by this way of releasing written material – in yesteryear this is how most fiction was done. Ok, maybe not as it was written, but released by chapter. For example, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was originally published in 36 weekly installments. Only a year later was it condensed into three books. Publishers take note: this could target a larger market – anyone and everyone can read a chapter a week but a full book seems so daunting. Oh, and it gives you the opportunity to earn more money from the biggest fans. In order to get the book ahead of everyone else, you have to buy it in 36 parts that will cost more than if you just waited a year. Brilliant!

Keep reading…

I don’t have any coherent thoughts to share with you today, so I thought I would go with two completely disjointed things that I enjoyed in the last week.

The first is one of my favorite paragraphs I have read in a while (mainly because there are so many links). From a TechCrunch article about how the startup Tagged underwent a major pivot:

First, some context. We’re not at all unique. Many successful startups go through some form of pivot, changing their direction when their first idea was not successful. PayPal was beaming money between Palm Pilots. YouTube was a video dating site. Twitter was group SMS, which came out of a struggling Odeo. Pandora started as a B2B music recommendation service. Groupon started as The Point, serving collective political action. The list goes on.

And a silly math video. Check it out if you like word problems that make no sense, videos designed to look older than they are, or even just dry humor.