According to at least one account, the big star of the NewTeeVee Live conference put on by the gang at GigaOm wasn't the CEO of Hulu, or the head of Netflix, or even alterna-star Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing. It was 15-year-old video artist Lucas Cruikshank, otherwise known simply as Fred. Lucas was a bored teen somewhere in Nebraska when he decided to parody some of the self-obsessed video bloggers on YouTube and came up with the persona of Fred, a hyperactive pre-teen who speaks in an incredibly annoying, squeaky voice. He is a bona fide YouTube superstar.

While musicians and comedians with years of training and talent are desperately trying to get more views for their videos on YouTube, the phenomenon known as Fred records a video of himself leaning into the camera and making faces while sounding like one of the Chipmunks and gets more than a million views. The video I've embedded here has more than 11 million, and that's after less than four months. His latest video has only been up for a day a single day and already has more than 400,000 views, and the one before that (two weeks old) has 2 million. His is the most subscribed channel on YouTube and has more than 125 million views in total. Next up: product placement and celebrity cameos.

Watching Fred's videos is one of those things that separates adults from kids, just like Ren & Stimpy or any one of a dozen annoying and yet hilarious cartoon shows. As Cruikshank says in one of his interviews, viewers almost instantly either love Fred or they hate him and no doubt plenty of older viewers will argue that all Fred's success proves is that any old piece of crap can get millions of views. I disagree. Young Lucas has done one thing that even big networks do fairly infrequently: he has tapped directly into the heart of his target market, which is probably easier for him because he is the target market. But he is also obsessive and passionate, and as Jason Kilar of Hulu says, that is a big part of being a success.

But Lucas is also a smart video producer, whether he does it intentionally or not. His clips are short, they aren't exactly complicated, he builds loyalty by using the same routines or catch-phrases, and he times the release of new videos for when his fan base gets out of school. That's smart. Annoying he may be, but he is clearly far from dumb. Whether he can translate any of his popularity into a real business without irritating his fans remains to be seen, but if I worked at Nickelodeon or Teletoon or some place like that, I would get him in to teach my staff about how to play this game.

Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll's foolishly imperious monarch, gay rights activists have adopted a "vote first, campaign afterward" approach to trying to win marriage rights for same-sex couples.

My colleague Gerry Smith reports that "thousands of gay-marriage advocates took to the streets of downtown Chicago on Saturday, hoping to galvanize support" for same-sex marriage. It was just one of many protests nationwide, all aimed at Proposition 8, an anti gay-marriage ballot referendum in California.

In the last 12 days or so, protesters have been picketing Mormon churches and other religious institutions that have supported Proposition 8 and launching a legal effort to have the referendum itself declared unconstitutional.

Though I'm totally behind their cause, my response to this burst of activity and determination is a puzzled, "Umm....."

The vote was Nov. 4. Traditionally, the time for demonstrations, rallies, protests, pre-emptory lawsuits and so on is before the election.

That's when moving public opinion can do you the most good.

Proposition 8 was no secret, particularly not in California. Nor was it a secret that it was doing well in the polls and that various religious institutions were putting big money into the campaign for passage.

Post-election analysis of Prop 8's narrow victory had it that gay-marriage advocates were outhustled, outspent and otherwise outcampaigned by gay-marriage opponents.

Advocates did not, for instance, make much of an effort to win support in minority communities, where homosexuality remains a greater taboo than it is non-minority communities -- even though Barack Obama's name on the presidential ballot was sure to spark a heavy turnout in those communities.

The advocates' legal claim now is that Prop. 8 represents too great a change to the California Constitution to be approved by a simple majority vote. The courts may agree, I have no idea. But the time for that argument was before the election; before asking for nullification of the result looked so much like the complaint of sore losers.

The defeat has galvanized supporters of gay marriage. Why wasn't the prospect of defeat enough?

I ran the above by Rick Garcia, public policy director of Equality Illinois:

You hit it on the head.

I was thrilled with the massive turnout throughout the country. And in Illinois we had unprecedented demonstrations in Chicago, Carbondale, Springfield, Peoria and Champaign

As much as I hate to say this I wonder where were these thousands of people before November 4?

I think a huge problem was that proponents of the proposition fought hard and dirty. Opponents were paralyzed by political correctness, by a refusal to play hardball politics (they should have spent a few weeks in training in Chicago!). They relied too much on focus groups and polling and didn't do the hard political work of getting our votes out on election day. Our sides ads were insipid at best while the proponents ran hard scary ads.

And, this community has been lulled into complacency. We won marriage in California, our neighbors tolerate us, the delightful heterosexuals in our neighborhood would never vote against us. How many friends, family and neighbors of gay people voted yes? And, we are to blame because far to many of us didn't have the necessary conversations with our neighbors, family and friends.

I haven't seen this much anger and outrage and desire to do something since the beginning of the AIDS crisis. I hope it can be harnessed for good so that we don't have another Prop 8 loss. But the question is where was this enthusiasm before the vote?

Andy Thayer, co-founder of the Gay Liberation Network. added these thoughts:

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It can take a lot to amaze those of us who study the web's impact on on the world, but the speech and reach of the organizing against California's Proposition 8, passed on the same day Barack Obama was elected president, has been simply astonishing.

In a handful of days, a movement called "Join the Impact" has gone from a humble website dreamed up by a 26 year-old Seattleite to a global movement which, as the New York Times' Claire Cain Miller noted, generated protests this weekend in 300 cities in fifty states (and the District of Columbia), and eight countries.

Organizing via the Web, When Time's Counted in Hours, Not Months or Years

Perhaps a bit surprisingly, Miller and others have done a good job covering the enormous role of the web in the protests. Organizing has happened almost solely on the JointheImpact.com hub, on Facebook, and through a wiki service called Wetpaint.

The latter two have been most important. Not only has the national Join the Impact Facebook group swollen to 34,000 members, but dozens of local, home-grown cells of activists are also organized on the site. One rally in Raleigh, North Carolina promoted the attendance of "One Tree Hill" star Sophia Bush and got commitments to attend from more than 700 people. Another at Houston's City Hall had more than 600 confirmed guests as of this weekend, and called for protestors to only bring signs that "don't have anything antagonistic or hateful written on them."

Wetpaint, Join the Impact's virtual organizing center, is wiki technology geared towards social organizing -- whether that's around opposing the rollback of marriage equality or a shared fondness for "High School Musical."

As we hear back from the rallies that took place this weekend, it's become clear that the Join the Impact movement is now a landmark case study for anyone interested in understanding political organizing in the Internet age -- not only for its massive scale, but for the sort of inclusive organizing that's being attempted.

Who's Being Touched by the Movement?

From the beginning, the Join the Impact movement was motivated by the idea that the next step in the fight for LGBTQ rights was educational, not legal. While some protestors stormed the gates at Mormon churches across the country, Amy Balliet, the founder of JointheImpact.com, wrote that the mission of the group was to reach out across communities, never scapegoating, but "engaging our opposition in a conversation about full equality and to do this with respect, dignity, and an attitude of outreach and education."

In fact, in the aftermath of the declaration of Proposition 8's victory, a choice appeared, detailed in a post-mortem by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara in the Democratic Strategist. The political fight could continue. Or the focus could be on education, on creating a bedrock of social change so that any victories, in the courts or legislatures, could take root in the public space, sparing them the fate of Roe vs. Wade -- hotly contested by a country that still hasn't come to terms with the subject.

Which raises a question. It's settled fact that the Internet makes it easier to organize. But does it make it easier to organize people not (obviously) like you?

I put the question to four of the local organizers of this weekend's rallies, in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Oregon. In short, it does seem like the Join the Impact protests are drawing significant support outside the LGBTQ world. But is the Internet is a factor, helping organizing to make the leap over the gaps between gay and straight that still exist in American society? Are we becoming one interconnected country, linked by Facebook news feeds?

That remains to be studied. Anecdotal evidence, though, suggests that Join the Impact organizers have managed to build diverse coalitions in nearly no time at all.

Local Organizers Weigh In

Tom Greene, a 23 year-old a social studies teacher in North Carolina, who helped organize the Raleigh rally that featured TV star Sophia Bush. Putting together the event, Greene told me, was a one-two punch. Join the Impact seeded the effort, and they ran with it locally on Facebook. Greene's personal estimate: fully half of the 1,400 people who turned out for Saturday's event were heterosexual.

Brandi Fitzgerald, a 32 year-old photographer, organized Philadelphia's Join the Impact event, held downtown's Dilworth Plaza. Saying that she can't imagine how civil rights organizing occurred in the pre-Internet age, Fitzgerald credits the "netroots" movement has "allow[ing] us to prove" that human beings are connected. Within a week, the Facebook group she launched grew to more than 1,300 members. Fitzgerald reports that Saturday's event had "a large turnout of straight families, young and old."

(Fitzgerald's one complaint? The limitations that Facebook places on organizing -- for example, not allowing group conveners to export the email addresses of those they've organized.)

Thirty-two year-old Derek Stephens organized in Columbus, Ohio's City Hall, and estimates that turnout reached 700 people credits Wetpaint. "This was how I got my speakers, volunteers and anything else I needed." The response of those outside the LGBTQ community was, he says, eye opening. The message of Sunday's rally, said Stephans, "was about love, not gender."

Finally, Becky Groves helped to organize the rally in Bend, Oregon's Brandis Square. The Internet, she reports, was "very helpful" in organizing an event that was to be held more than 30 miles from where she lives. Did the event, I ask, attract support from outside the LGBT community? "Definitely, yes," says Grove. In fact, she herself is straight.

It remains to be seen whether Join the Impact Internet-powered organizing can win over hearts and minds in the days ahead. But one thing is for certain. Some are already believers in the movement's power.

Philadelphia's Fitzgerald says that she'd she'd never organized politically before a week or so ago. And today, she's scheduled to turn in paperwork to start a local chapter of the national group Marriage Equality USA. Says Fitzgerald, "I have cried every day over the sheer power this has had."

"The people who started Join The Impact were a few friends who had an idea," says Columbus's Derek Stephens. "One person reached out to another, and it ended up a national movement."

Photos of this weekend's Join the Impact rally in Philadelphia used with the generous permission of Michael Albany -- copyright Magick Michael Photography

Youthful incarnations of James T. Kirk and Spock are just two of the revelations in the new trailer for J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek movie.

The trailer, attached to this weekend's Quantum of Solace opening, shows plenty of warp-speed action as it introduces the characters in the Trek prequel.

If you didn't see the new Bond flick, you can still see the Trek teaser: A bootleg version of the trailer (embedded) is available on YouTube. Watch it now before it goes away.

The ship and the explosions have obviously been updated from the lovable cheesiness of the original TV series, but other things have been modernized as well: There's even a quick shot of what looks like Uhuru stripping down to her space-bra.

Will fans of the four-decade-old franchise go for the updated Star Trek? What do you think after getting an eyeful of Abrams' version?

See also:

• Worries Surface as Abrams Previews Star Trek in Europe
• Star Trek Writers Brace for Impact
• Preview Photos Reveal Look of New Star Trek
• Star Trek Stills, Trailer Hit the Web
• New Star Trek Teaser Posters Beam in Gravitas

My introduction to this case was at a symposium last year at William and Mary. There, Navy and NRDC lawyers did pitched battle on whether the Navy should be allowed to conduct its training exercises, when the sonar causes injuries to marine mammals.

The Supreme Court decision is really appalling, all about putting the thumb on the injunction equities scale in favor of the Navy's arguments that it just has to keep these training exercises going or national readiness will suffer. Needless to say, we know one young woman who's disappointed today.

There are actually great opportunities for those during a recession for professionals, restrained resources and competition will force you to become excellent in whatever you do. You'll be forced to learn new skills and be more efficient than you've ever before. Some layoffs will leave opportunities for vertical growth and leadership opportunities.

You're going to need a leg up in the market whether it be in your company, outside of your company, or to win new clients. You should start this process now, a simple three letter acronym that you should repeat during your day to yourself. Ready?

Growing your Career: Do at GUT Check:

G: Grow Your Network Before You Need Them
Nothing is more sad that seeing someone getting layed off and groveling to their non-qualified friends and family the need for a job. After this, they'll go to their professional network to help and network with others, but the look of desperation is evident no one wants to be hired out of pity. Be prepared.

Therefore you should always be building your professional network, espicially when your job feels secured. There's really no excuse as many real world networking events are free, but if you're in Juno, err Juneau Alaska, you can heavily lean on the digital tools, they're also free. You should start by building your online profile in social network sites, finding the communities most tied to your industry, then reading, then answering some of the questions in forums. The trick here is to add value, not just ask for help, demonstrate your expertise by answering questions in an intelligent way and helping others. If you're a web professional, start with my Facebook group, or if you're a social media professional, I created this one for you. I'm not scalable but networks are so you'll have to connect with others around us to grow.

U: Uncomfortable, Leads to Growth
When you look at a candidates resume, and you see (esp in web industry) they've not grown in the last 3-5 years with their skillets, you ought to be worried. In a tough market, employers and clients want self-starters, those that go beyond the regular call of just doing the minimum requirements. Being Uncomfortable means trying something new, and eventually growing.

When I was an intern right out of college, I made a promise to myself to bug everyone in the IT department to teach me a new skill or task. You'd be surprised how thankful they were that someone so young wanted to learn from them. Each day, you should do the same, find someone and ask them to show you something or teach you something new in your career. What am I doing? I spend two hours each morning reading and blogging before I look at email, and I just started Guy's latest book, Reality Check.

T: Tout Your Successes
Getting found online is part of the game, recruiters are going to do web searches before they purchase time on my job board, so you want to easily make yourself found. By this time if you're a web professional and you don't have your own personal domain I'm concerned for you, what are you waiting for, it's only 10 dollars to register and 5 a month to host at some places.

If you're worried about looking like you're trying to find a new job, you can use your initials and just list the industry that you're working in to protect your identity. If you're still concerned, rather than post your resume on your own website, keep your LinkedIn profile updated with the higlights.

At industry parties and events I always ask folks: What do you do it's surprising how folks are unable to articulate what they do, they beat around the bush, are self-deprecating, or try to avoid the topic all together. Instead, develop a single sentence describing what you do, practice your delivery, and learn how to ask an open ended question to trigger a conversation.

One caveat, this does not give you the right to be a raging egomaniac on your blog or website (sorta how I fear I come off sometimes) but is the chance for you to list what you're capable of doing, what you've done, and what you can do for others.

Everyday I want you to do a GUT check, practice these skills, build your arsenal, don't hesitate but do it now. Are you an HR professional, career development expert, or just learned a helpful tip along the way?? Now's your time to leave a comment here with some other tips to demonstrate your own tips. Leave a comment or suggestion to help others.

I've never been a huge fan of Dreamworks Animation's features. While the first Shrek was, at the time, kind of funny the subsequent films have just been loose excuses to hang a bunch of too-cool for the room pop-culture references and off-color humor that just stops shy of being inappropriate for young audiences.

That's why Kung Fu Panda is such a refreshing change and, honestly, might be one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen this year.

KFP is the story of Po, a panda who works with his father (a goose, a disconnect that's hinted at just enough to be funny without being beaten into the ground) in a noodle shop in a small village. But in between slinging noodles Po dreams of being a kung fu master, idolizing the Furious Five, a group of kung fu prodigies who protect the village. Through a variety of circumstances, Po comes to be chosen as the warrior who will ultimately defeat a former student of master Shifu who turned to evil ways when he felt he was being overlooked.

The great thing about Kung Fu Panda is that it's free of all the things that have cluttered the computer-animated features from just about everyone but Pixar. No characters break into Godfather lines, no one all of a starts laughing at a Star Wars joke. And, most surprisingly, there aren't 78 crotch or poop jokes. Instead Po is good natured and well meaning and, while he's not the most talented cat on the block, he never ridicules those who are more skilled than he is. He just keeps trying.

That's why I'm so anxious to watch the movie with my kids. It's completely appropriate for them, without any content that I would find objectionable or which I would worry about them emulating, resulting in my telling them to stop it. If there is it's so miniscule I didn't even notice it. That sort of situation has been in rare supply outside of overtly moralistic properties like Veggie Tales (which we love, just for the record). Everything is either completely, almost condescendingly pure or all about the fart jokes and telling people to shut up.

The DVD, available now, comes packed with extras that are geared toward kids, including activities and fun little featurettes that go behind the scenes of the movie and its characters. Some editions also come packaged with a bonus disc titled Secrets of the Furious Five. That short feature (about 22 minutes) goes behind the stories of the others that Po is training with. It's animated in a more traditional style, one that's very reminiscent of Japanese paintings and art. It's quite enjoyable in and of itself, though obviously more so if you've seen the main movie. That disc has its own batch of bonus features that further expand on things.

I enjoyed Kung Fu Panda to a great extent. As I said, it ranks right up there with Iron Man as one of my favorite movies of the year and it's highly recommended.

Nationwide "Join the Impact" Rallies

In the days after the vote, Seattle activist Amy Balliett put up a website calling for others to Join the Impact against Prop 8. She told 365gay.com that she was amazed to soon find it pulling in some 50,000 hits per hour, crashing its server. The Join the Impact mission is to make communion with Prop 8 supporters, "to encourage our community to engage our opposition in a conversation about full equality and to do this with respect, dignity, and an attitude of outreach and education." Its success is reminiscent of Columbia's anti-FARC movement launched on Facebook that spawned protests all over the world:

"For me it's second nature," says Balliett of social networking. "It's my job. I think: Need to organize an event? Use the Internet. Throw a party? Use Evite. Technology offers a platform on which to hold the conversation. It's also given a platform for us to rally together and organize."

The Join the Impact group has launched visibility events to be held on November 15th across the country, putting out a call to "let the country hear our voices together. Let them see that we are a strong, adamant, and powerful community that deserves equal rights." That's a strategy supported by a recent critique of the anti-Prop 8 campaign by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara in The Democratic Strategist, which called for a unified grassroots approach. So far, 22,000 people have said they're attending local Join the Impact rallies. A rally in Hartford Connecticut, for example, already has 120 confirmed guests. One at City Hall in Fayetteville, Arkansas -- where adoption by same-sex couples was banned on the 4th -- has 14. Augmenting Join the Impact's Facebook strategy is the collaborative software Wetpaint.

Protesting the Mormon Church

Join the Impact organizer Balliett wants supporters to tame the urge to pin blame for Prop 8 on the Mormon Church, but not everyone is on board with that idea. A rally tonight in New York City at the Mormon Temple on the Upper West Side is expected to draw a quite a crowd.

The Utah-based Mormon Church is, when you boil it down, being targeted for its own success at social networking. San Francisco Catholic Archbishop George Niederauer, who had spent more than a decade in Salt Lake City, asked the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to pitch in against Proposition 8. In turn, the Mormon Church encouraged its members to support Prop 8 with the money and energy in a letter read to all California congregations. That brought in an estimated $20 million of contributions for the measure, which became public through a campaign finance database hosted by anti-8 forces.

And a new website called invalidateprop8.org sets up tax-deductable donations to legal aide groups fighting Prop 8 -- to be made in the name of Thomas Monson, president of the Mormon Church.

"Call in Gay" Day

A new Facebook group called "A Day Without a Gay" echoes the walkouts we saw during the massive immigration rallies of 2006, where people skipped work to both draw attention to the debate and show the economic impact of immigrants. More than 700 people have signed up to "call in gay" on December 10th. Perhaps owing to its misinterpretable name, the group was reportedly dropped by Facebook this morning for being "hateful, threatening, or obscene." I have a word out to Brock Ogletree, the group's creator, to find out more about what happened there.

A MySpace group with 620 members originally planned its own "Day Without a Gay" event for December 5th, but it quickly regrouped when organizers noticed that others events were forming around the web. It too is planning events for the 10th, noting that the day also happens to be International Human Rights Day.

Prop 8 Backers Also Know How to Network

Perhaps owing to the fact that things went their way on the 4th, the pro-Prop 8 folks have been quiet on the web of late. But before the vote, the coalition made good use of YouTube. In this "Yes on 8" video from the Mormon Church-led Preserving Marriage coalition, Prop 8 backers could be easily mistaken for a local gathering of Obama supporters. In a cozy living room littered with laptops, they talk about how empowered they feel by sharing their personal stories with one another. The overall feeling is one of community and connectedness.

One supporter, Kenny, sits at his MacBook saying "Everyone can do really well in their own field, so they should do what they do to promote Prop 8. For example, I'm an Internet guy. I can make websites, so I made a website...Write a blog, put it out there. Make a YouTube video." Says another smiling pro-Prop 8 organizer: "The Internet is such a great resource. We can really extend our nets that way."

But they have stiff competition on YouTube from Keith Olbermann, whose impassioned "special comment" (transcript) against Prop 8 has been reposted dozens of times. "They want what you want," says Olbermann. "A chance to be a little less alone in the world."

There's an argument circulating that "The Cosby Show" laid the groundwork for President-elect Barack Obama by presenting an appealing black family, the Huxtables, to young TV viewers who grew up equipped to thwart stereotypes and barriers.

Writer Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez called her theory "the Huxtable effect," a counter to the so-called Bradley effect (named for failed black California gubernatorial hopeful Tom Bradley) of possible hidden racism among white voters.

For all of his pop sensibility, Gladwell sees himself as something of a fuddy-duddy. If, as Michael Kinsley once observed, Al Gore was an old person's idea of a young person, then Gladwell is a young person's idea of an old person's idea of a young person. Beneath the crazy hair, the slobby-chic clothes, and the buzzword-filled vocabulary is an old-fashioned guy who grew up among Mennonites in rural Ontario, didn't have a TV until he was 23, and still prefers to do most of his research at the NYU library. Google is something of a personal hobbyhorse: Google is the answer to the problem we didn't have. It doesn't tell you what's interesting or what's important. There's still more in the library than there is on Google.