There were roughly 100 book deals involving blogs or Internet memes last year according to Publisher’s Marketplace.

Christopher Weingarten, 31, was one of them. A year ago, he decided to start a blog about dogs, dressed as hipsters. He gets readers to submit photos and attaches a witty caption.

Over three million hits and thousands of submissions later, he just recently landed a book deal, with the book hitting bookstores in July. While the freelance music writer discloses that his book deal was not six-figures, it was “certainly more than the $3,000 advance I got for doing a book about music.”

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“When you find other Mac users, they’re so happy to find other people, it’s like the underdog,” says Peter Isgrigg, Product Manager at Apple specialist Tekserve in Manhattan, and self-proclaimed Mac fanatic, and subject of my new video on Apple’s cult-like status.

“When you’re in a minority and you find other people in that minority group, you tend to latch on to them and you tend to find a source of pride, or positivity in that uniqueness, and I think that’s where a lot of Mac users get that fanaticism,” Mr. Isgrigg says.

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Caller ID spoofing technology allows a user to change the caller ID to show any desired number on a recipient’s caller ID display. There are currently a handful of companies that offer this service including SpoofCard (and its mobile application called Spoof App) and Spoofem, among others.

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Protector, which debuts Thursday at CES, is made by Taser International, a company that’s best known for its series of electronic stun guns (watch the video below, from CES 2009, to see The Journal’s Andy Jordan test one out for himself).

Protector uses GPS so that a child’s calls, texts, emails and photos are first routed to the parent’s phone, where they can be screened and blocked if desired. It also monitors a child’s location and can even track driving habits, Taser said. (In case you’re wondering, it emphasized that Protector is not a stun gun.)

Parents can dial up restrictions by, say, blocking all calls from outside a local area code, or ease up by allowing all text messages to be received. “It grows with the child,” a Taser spokesman said, in that the special needs of each age group can be addressed.

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Blu Dot, a furniture maker based in Minneapolis, found out with its “Real Good Experiment,” it developed with branding firm Mono. The experiment was equal parts marketing campaign for the chairs, which retail for $129, and research into the recession-friendly phenomenon of “curb mining”–the practice of nabbing household items left on street corners.

In the days leading up to the placing of the chairs, the experiment was picked up on blogs and gained a Twitter following. Some Blu Dot enthusiasts were following real-time locations of the chairs in hopes of nabbing one. The chairs also contained a hidden note, that when discovered by the takers, indicated they should call a number to be interviewed later.

“The key to this idea was involvement,” Michael Hart, founder of Mono, said. “Not just them taking the chairs, but the whole community with this notion of an experiment and “Where will the chairs go?’”

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In that transition, Current has cut shows and staff, with the most recent layoffs happening last week. The announcement has prompted questions about citizen journalism’s future, though Mark Rosenthal, Current’s CEO and a former president and operating chief at MTV Networks, said that it isn’t in doubt.

“Current’s mission has not changed one iota,” he said in an interview. “Citizen journalism is far from dead.”

The moves are among Current’s first big changes from Mr. Rosenthal, who helped take MTV from videos to reality and entertainment programming in the ’90s. And while he said the network is still committed to viewer-created content, the format still faces plenty of skepticism as a business model.

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One of the big debates is about keyboard layouts, which includes the traditional Qwerty design and the user-friendly but obscure Dvorak. Designers, however, have begun an even more far-reaching conversation about how we input information and whether there’s a product yet to hit the mainstream that could replace the keyboard altogether.

There’s certainly no shortage of innovative keyboards. An inverted “back-handed” one lets you cradle a keyboard and hit the keys from behind.

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And it got a present. Kind of. The modern Sony (SNE) Walkman digital music player beat out Apple’s (AAPL) iPod share of the portable music player market in Japan in the last week of August, according to a study by BCN, a Japanese electronics research firm. The Walkman took 43 percent of sales, compared with the iPod’s 42.1 percent, capping 241 weeks where the iPod reigned in Japan.

The study didn’t take into account sales of the iPhone, which researchers viewed primarily as a cellphone. But nostalgic Walkman aficionados might recognize the frenzy over the role of the iPod in popular culture.

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The crowd-sourced editing site gooseGrade.com surveyed 100 random English speakers on Amazon’s (AMZN) Mechanical Turk website who identified themselves either as “users” or “non-users” of the microblogging site.

Study participants had to write 100 words about what they did that day and were graded for spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Twitter users made about 20 percent more grammar errors than did their non-Twitter counterparts. But Twitter users were only about half as likely to make spelling mistakes as those who didn’t tweet.

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Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire, teamed up with New Scientist to test “remote viewing,” also known as extra-sensory perception or ESP.

I know what you’re thinking. Remote viewing is hogwash. But the U.S. government spent millions testing whether extra-sensory perception — the power to perceive details about an object far away through some sort of psychic ability — might be possible.

Prof. Wiseman lodged himself at a secret location on four occasions last week and solicited input from Twitterers around the world to chime in on where they thought he was. After they did that, he tweeted a Web site where participants could choose between five photos representing the correct location and four decoys.

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It then made him more than $100,000 in a few months, he says, through advertising on the free version and a $1.99 pro version. It emits a harsh squeal that irritates anyone within earshot, even in a crowded restaurant (I tried this–evil looks abounded).

These apps appeal to everybody, Mr. Bijl says. His frustration that “Sound Grenade” has flourished, compared to the tepid response to some of his more useful apps, is palpable.

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Exciting? Not!

Here he mistreats an animatronic dinosaur, which calls for more Tasering:

And here Jordan checks out tricked-out trucks at CES:

Favorite quote when Jordan asks a trucker if he has a laptop and is misheard: “Lap Dancer? No, I’m married.”

It’s certainly a long way from CB radio–10-4, good buddy.

WSJ Online’s Andy Jordan reports on three-dimensional printing at home, called Fab@Home.

In other words, someday you could “print” your own cellphone or even a robot that could walk out of the printer. And, it’s possible that device can even print food. Yum.

See here:

This time, it’s a collective of technologists and artists who are creating robotic musical instruments out of slime and other odd materials.

Ew! (Except for Slinky music, which is brilliant, as are all experiences one might have with what is arguably the greatest toy ever invented.)

Here’s the video:

“I’m an actual geek!” he tells one of his customers. Printer disaster! Too-hot laptop. Clip-on tie, white socks and black shoes! Fun!

Now, horror of horrors, there is a service on Virgin America where passengers can do seat-to-seat chatting. WSJ.com’s Tech Diary video blogger Andy Jordan tries it out and finds most people really don’t want to be bothered, although that does not seem to stop some from bothering anyway.

Also a problem: the touchscreens irk the people in front of the chatter, what with all the poking (which is icky enough on Facebook).

See for yourself:

That would be land-mine-finding rats and job-seeking opera singers!

Well, how can we resist posting that? And so we will not!

And MarketWatch’s media maven Jon Friedman does a video post related to his Media Web column on the Washington Post’s political reporter Anne Kornblut, using her to depict what the new breed of reporter needs to know how to do–namely, everything multimedia.

Besides the daily video, she also does a short blog post on the report with links from around the Web. Given only the first one to comment on, I would say Webb is a bit–how shall we put this delicately–excitable in her delivery (she seems to almost squeal several times and no one can get that animated about Apple’s three billionth iTunes song sale).

But she plows on through with admirable fortitude, and it looks great production-wise. I also like the scrolling notes running below her, even if they are slightly too cute.

Of course, who is BoomTown to talk? While I love to make videos from the various visits to Web moguls and companies, my production values are less, well, polished and that jiggly camera effect is not on purpose, as much as I would like to claim I am an artist. Yes, I know, I am flip to the point of annoyance to some. One plus: You never have to see my face!

All kidding aside, you could quibble with all the nascent online video efforts in the tech space. But, in general, the new Web video offerings are relatively good, and I expect there will be many more to come.

We have already been posting new WSJ.com tech video blogger Andy Jordan‘s Tech Diary, for example, as well as noting the entry of Om Malik into the online video space with a new weekly interview show.

Still, none are as snarky as as our very own John Paczkowski of Digital Daily with his daily video on tech news. It must be said: His arched eyebrow and puppetry skills remain unequaled.

Here is Webb’s first video, followed by John’s latest (complete with scary Rupert puppet):