Thankfully, my skepticism was misplaced. The book is chockablock with puzzles of all sorts, which are woven into the story in such a way that the reader/listener is challenged to solve them along with the protagonists. My nearly-eight-year-old son, who loves puzzles nearly as much as I do, was captivated by this aspect of the book, though my six-year-old daughter less so. Don't think the puzzles are all the book has to offer, though: It has great characters, a solid plot, and a great deal of humor mixed into a serious story.

The Mysterious Benedict Society introduces us to four amazing kids, who will later form the title group: Reynie Muldoon, George "Sticky" Washington, Kate Wetherall, and Constance Contraire. They are all parentlessthree are orphans, and one is a runawayand they are brought together through a series of tests by a man named Mr. Benedict. He has a mission for them with the ultimate goal of doing no less than saving the world, from a mind control scheme so devious that only a team of very gifted children (each gifted in his/her own way) can possibly hope to conquer it. If this sounds quirky, it is, but there's a great deal more detail involved that I don't wish to reveal for fear of ruining some of the great surprises the book has in store.

The author, Trenton Lee Stewart, has a great gift for storytelling. This book will join the His Dark Materials and Harry Potter books on the shelves of our house in the section of books written for kids that my wife and I would gladly read by ourselves. He has a near-Dickensian gift for characters' names, with (among others) a villain named Ledroptha Curtain and a comic secondary character named S.Q. Pedalian (who, ironically, stumbles over every long word he uses). A lot of the puzzle and mystery resolutions are predictable by adults, but much less so by kids, and the characters and plot are captivating enough that you'll barely notice, anyway.

The Mysterious Benedict Society , by Trenton Lee Stewart, is available in paperback for a list price of $6.99. Its sequel, which my kids, my wife, and I are now dying to read, is The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey , and is available in hardcover for a list price of $16.99. The official website for the books is really well done, too, and well worth a look.

This is what we saw (1 min):

Some other accounts of the event:

Neil Girling: Extra Action Marching Band led the crowd in jubilation, and there were many cheers and chants of Obama and U S A. The mood was ecstatic, and the cops were polite and extremely hands-off; a little after midnight, when they finally asked Extra Action Marching Band who have a reputation for chaos and noise to start to shut down, they did so with smiles and were met with the same.

Tim Redmond, SFBay Guardian: San Francisco is going crazy. I haven't seen this much excitement in the streets since we shut down the city when the Iraq war began. But this time, we actually have something to celebrate.

Sean Bonner, SF Metblogs: My neighborhood went 9 kinds of insane last night.

Strange Things Will Happen: It was like Italy had won the World Cup, only with less mopeds and more high-fiving.

Respond to all negative comments When I, David Spark,
started being seen publically in print, TV, radio, and online I read everyone's comments, but focused more intently on the negative ones. I wasted a lot of time putting far too much effort into defending myself to these anonymous naysayers than they put into attacking me. I soon understood that some geeks simply can't help themselves being negative. They've got an obnoxious strand of DNA and must constantly try to prove themselves smarter than you.

Participate in flame wars to increase traffic Similarly, Dana Gardner, blogger for ZDNet, admits he would engage in online arguments just to watch his Web traffic shoot up. But over time Gardner realized that flame wars don't attract the right kind of audience. Going to the lowest emotional common denominator to me is an ineffective way of reaching that audience. I'd rather come up with valuable insightful fresh innovative content than appeal to angry white men sitting around computers that don't have anything else to do, Gardner said.

Hire a voice talent for $2,000 to read a podcast for you Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint and prominent blogger, made a massive blunder when he decided to get into podcasting. His first show was actually a whitepaper read by a voice talent for $2,000. The resulting podcast sounded like a book on tape and he and his colleagues were horrified. That episode was never published, but the voice talent did get paid.

Send a specially selected mass mailing to your friends Susan Bratton, co-founder and CEO of Personal Life Media, is still having a problem trying to scale individual relationships with social media. Even when she pares down her mailing list of 8,000 to a personally selected mailing of 250, she still gets nasty messages telling her to take me off this list.

Assume that social media doesn't exist until you arrive Social media strategist Chris Brogan and founder of PodCamp reached out to the New England podcasters' bulletin board and said he was going to invite all the social media rock stars to come to Boston for Podcamp. Nobody responded to what he thought was a generous offer until he saw a response on the board that said, There are a lot of rock stars in Boston and it's kind of offensive you got to import them from other places. Brogan learned from his mistake. Wherever you go on the Web realize there's been a history. Don't assume you know everything and discredit what's been done before you arrived, Brogan said.

Post a comment on your own Facebook profile wall David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR and the upcoming book World Wide Rave, needed his teenage daughter to point out his massive social networking faux pas. After setting up his Facebook profile, he showed it to his daughter to which she responded, You're not supposed to write on your own wall. You're such a dork, dad.

Don't engage with people who only want to push their own initiative Ego and personal agendas often take over many online communications, and Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, used to ignore these self promoters. He doesn't anymore realizing that these self promoters are looking to create an association with you and your business. You really want to engage with every conversation that relates with your brand, Mayfield advised, Even if you don't want to necessarily draw attention to the existence of a competitor.

Over-architect a site with features and content without talking to your customers Deb Schultz, social media strategist for P&G, fell into the trap of making too many assumptions about what an audience wanted and just started developing a site loaded with features and functionality. It's what happens when you work at a big company and you don't see outside of the four walls of the organization. Schultz admitted she should have spent more time talking with customers instead of adding more content to the site.

Be overly careful about everything you say online Futurist Thornton May claims he still falls into the trap of self-editorializing when writing online. Even though May understands that what makes social media valuable is that it's authentic, real, and unfinished, he still is extremely careful about what he says and that takes the edge off his online persona. He blames his age and says people of his generation are not familiar nor necessarily comfortable engaging in online discussions.

Don't come to your own defense when people bad mouth you online It's often a good idea to have others defend you in a public debate. But Peter Hirshberg chairman of Technorati and co-founder of The Conversation Group got into a situation where his silence in a debate about a product release was just seen as rather peculiar and it backfired on him.

Accept friend requests from people you barely know Robin Wolaner, founder of the 40+ social networking site TBD.com, made the mistake of accepting friend requests from people she barely knew. These non-friends on her network happened to be very prolific posters and she couldn't turn down their noise. Many social networks don't offer a setting that allows you to only get information from your close friends and not from people you barely know. The only thing she could do was de-friend them, and as a result some were insulted.

Stalk women on Facebook Stewart Alsop, partner of Alsop Louie Partners, claims this is not a mistake and he's extremely proud of it. Of his 1200+ friends on Facebook, Alsop claims he has about 400 attractive women as Facebook friends. In his mid-50s, Alsop reaches out to young attractive women and asks if he can be their friend. Many say yes. Alsop says he's an old guy and it makes him feel as if he's got something going on. There's no downside for Alsop. Some may think it's weird, but it doesn't change anything for him.

You haven't done everything right online, have you? Want to fess up to a massive blunder in social media?

David Spark is a veteran tech journalist and the founder of Spark Media Solutions, a custom editorial production company. Read more of Spark at his blog Spark Minute and to read and hear interviews with many of the aforementioned people, subscribe to Spark's Be the Voice blog and podcast.

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Larry Brilliant, the Executive Director of Google.org, is the face and mind behind Google's philanthropic entity. Here's a snip from his bio:

Larry is an M.D. and M.P.H., board-certified in preventive medicine and public health. He is a founder and director of The Seva Foundation, which works in dozens of countries around the world, primarily to eliminate preventable and curable blindness. He serves as a member of the strategic advisory committee for Kleiner Perkins (KPCB) Venture Capital and also sits on the boards of The Skoll Foundation, Health Metrics Network, Omidyar Networks Humanity United, and InSTEDD, an organization bringing technological tools to improve disaster response.

In addition to his medical career, Larry co-founded The Well, a pioneering virtual community, with Stewart Brand in 1985. He also holds a telecommunications technology patent and has served as CEO of two public companies and other venture-backed start-ups.

Talk about web meets world!

Google.org has already invested in scores of projects and companies (a full list is here). It's a varied, impressive, and extremely ambitious list that includes goals like finding renewable energy that costs less than coal, changing the face of global health care, developing country IT infrastructure and entrepreneurs, and much ore.

I am kicking off Web 2 by interviewing Larry. So what you you ask him?

They don't like firing people or eating contracts, but they loooooooove hiring people. Nothing makes a network exec happier than announcing, We're bringing in so-and-so! And the sheer power of numbers makes shows feel like a bigger event than they actually are, so instead of choosing between Emmitt and Keyshawn, or Marino and Boomer, or Tiki and Bettis, they just keep both under the bigger is better! premise. Even if it inadvertently clogs up their shows and flies against the face of everything that has ever worked well on a Sunday pregame show.

Unfortunately, cable news networks seem to be picking up this fumble and running the wrong way with it. Here's MSNBC's wall of experts covering the Wall Street crisis. Jon Stewart labelled it the decabox.

Not to be outdone, CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 featured 14 (14!?) people onscreen at the same time analyzing last night's debate.

If CNN ran a restaurant, the kitchen would probably look like this:

The entire episode of The Daily Show tonight was worth watching.

It's a lot like what I used to imagine the life of a daily newspaper cartoonist was like by being doomed to come up with something really clever, interesting and entertaining everyday. There are some people that can do that, but I don't consider this ti be my destiny, it's just what I've had to do the best I can.

I start to get nervous and imagine the Daily Show with John Stewart. I count how many writers they have on my fingers. About 18. Then I'll look back down at my script and wonder if I'm kidding myself. Time is running out, I only have about 4 hours left.

I try to keep myself in the shoes of the audience. It's almost always about that one person who is the extremist that I'm concerned about. For every single story and every single word, there is someone who will hang on it and go nuts if it's not right. If I can account for the extremities, it will help to keep them moving along.

I check the news tips folder in my Apple mail again and log into Bloglines to run through the new posts in my aggregated list of sites - it's mostly about finding the unique stories that are already interesting and entertaining, when it's a really good one, and not yet popularized, internationally. I email Ellie and she sends over a good list of links and I remember that Joanne will help assure the structure is sound.

I would suggest that most shows fall short, in part, because of poor writing. Just from observing, it seems like most people are not that great at story telling and their jokes are not that funny. They are not picking the more interesting stories and they are not answering the important questions. I know what you are thinking: Hypocrite! Ok, we're working on it.

And so with no further ado, I'm happy to announce that last week we hired four writers to contribute to Rocketboom scripts moving forward.

I always imagined - true or not, I still don't know exactly- that there are these conference rooms in Los Angeles where groups of writers sit around the table and just laugh and write jokes all day long. One person throws out a joke about a bad movie, another person across the table one-ups that person, everyone laughs, and the story evolves and becomes more and more jam packed with references and entertaining information. [Photo of writers for the excellent Simpsons series]

We all agreed, we created this feeling together while working on writing scripts, over email. HQ in NYC of course, with one person in Philadelphia, one in Colorado, one in Canada and one in England, we all meet over email at certain times, send in stories, thread them together and then write full scripts, typically one upping each other, again and again. Obviously having four or five people working on writing a script can be much better than having just one. Simultaneously, we're now out of a bottle neck on the amount of content that we can produce per week and thus we are much better positioned to grow the content offerings.

Now we are in need of a tool like Backpack or some other collaborate software to stay organized while contributing online together from around the world. If anyone has any suggestions we would love to hear them.

Welcome aboard Chris, Alphaxion, Anna and Justin!

Chris Menning:

Denver, Colorado

http://www.chrismenning.com

http://www.myspace.com/straythenomad

http://www.twitter.com/straythenomad

http://www.digg.com/wonderbriefs

Chris Johnson a.k.a. Alphaxion:

Leeds, UK

http://twitter.com/alphaxion

http://www.pissheadnerds.com

http://www.alphaxion.com

Anna Goldfarb:

Philadelphia, PA

http://www.cupcakebrigade.com/

http://www.shmittenkitten.com/

http://twitter.com/cupcakebrigade

Justin Davey:

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

http://gpsobsessed.com/

http://twitter.com/justindavey

http://friendfeed.com/nexxgen

http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=558925522

Behind in my reading, but didn't want to overlook this in the NY Times: Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? The piece looks smartly at Stewart's appeal to young news consumers in an age of irony and of mistrust of the traditional media. (NY Times photo)

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed.

Crazy, huh? I suppose that's what it takes to record every 24hr news network around the clock, every day of the year. I wonder if they could reduce some of those by going to dual tuner TiVoHD models and dropping terabyte drives into them? I'm also curious if they store archival video footage onto file servers, or if they're only tracking the past 24hrs of the news cycle each day.