My brother's oldest little girl who is just 4 years old was recently diagnosed with Arnold-Chiari malformation. She is scheduled to have Decompression surgery on April 29 and wanted to take her to see Disney on Ice before her surgery since she will be in recovery for a while. It was a long shot but he emailed the Disney on Ice staff to see if she could meet Peter Pan after the show. She loves Peter Pan and seeing him would make her not so scared about her surgery.

The disney staff contacted him a few days before the show to tell him they would have someone there to meet the family and take them to their seats. When they arrived, this person asked them to stay after the show for a special treat. After the show the entire cast met the family and several of the characters even took Lexie and her baby sister ice skating around the rink. Their gesture was done completely out of kindness with no intentions of receiving PR value so I thought it was my duty to bring attention - this kind of thing doesn't happen much anymore.

Here is a letter my brother wrote to thank the staff because of their kind heartedness.

"First of all I would like to start by thanking the entire cast and crew for such a wonderful show. The show was absolutely fantastic. I would also like to thank all of the people that were involved in putting the after show meet together. The young man that played Peter Pan was absolutely amazing with my daughters. We were so full of joy and happiness to see our Lexie skating with her beloved Peter Pan. This young man knew exactly what to do, and my daughter will never forget it. He was insightful enough to take our youngest daughter out for a skate as well. PLEASE tell this young man he is our hero and always will be. All of the characters were wonderful and this is a night that we will never forget. Lexie’s decompression surgery (brain surgery) is scheduled for April 29th. My sweet girl has a tough road ahead and WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS what this meant to all of us. We are eternally grateful. "

Here is a video of a little girl's dream come true
Lexie and peter pan from sinster69 on Vimeo.

Thank you Disney. You get a home run for this one.

One of Plexus' clients, Carbon Motors Corp., has been getting a lot of attention from the media lately. I was the lead developer on their web site, and thus feel I have a lot invested in their success, so it makes me feel proud to see so much press coming their way.

Most recently, our friends at Carbon were featured on the front page of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. A week prior to that, they were featured in a CNN.com feature story, and will be the subject of an upcoming CNN television feature.

With so much media coverage, the website (http://carbonmotors.com) has been getting a lot of traffic, so much that we recently moved it to its own server in order to handle the bandwidth.

In addition, Carbon have actively been working with our SEO specialist Kelly Jones to get more traffic coming to the site, and search engine traffic has been steadily rising over the past few months. While it's difficult to say whether this is the result of Carbon's tireless efforts to spread the gospel of the E7, or Kelly's SEO wizardry, the short version of the story is that every day more and more people visit the Carbon Motors site. Is this the result of more press? Is the increase in press driven by the increased visibility of the website? In reality, it's a complex relationship with many factors, but what matters is that Carbon's public presence is on the upswing.

A whole new set of people will be introduced to Carbon Motors and the E7 in 2009. When they are, one of the first places they'll visit is carbonmotors.com. Thanks to Plexus and to proactive content management by Carbon, those visitors have an informative and content-rich destination they can use to inform themselves about a potential paradigm shift in how police cars are built. We at Plexus are proud to be at the forefront of that effort.

The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world, released a study that identifies trends and demographic information of Twitters users ie 'twits,' 'tweeps,' or 'tweeple.' Twitter is is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time.

The study shows that the use of Twitter has been most embraced by young adults: 20% of online adults 25 to 34 have used the technology while only 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds tweet. Overall, 11% of online adults use Twitter or update their status online

I'm not surprised that young adults dominate Twitter use; however my husband's 82 year-old granddad was asking me about it last week...so maybe the median age is on the rise.

In the US, 47% of Tweeters are female, 53% are male. From my interaction with Twinkle, an iphone Twitter app, it seems like there are more females out there using Twitter but I mostly see local use here in the Athens area.

Most tweeple are savvy Internet and technology users. In fact, more than three-quarters use the Internet wirelessly by laptop, PDA, iphone, or cell phone. Seems like this is the biggest reason for Twitter's popularity as you can access it from anywhere while you are on the go.

In addition, a plethora of third-party Twitter plug-in and sharing applications (like Twinkle, Twitterific, Tweetdeck, Yoono, etc. etc.) exists that allow users to customize its use and fit it into platforms they already use.

Other interesting facts from PEW:
median age of a twitter user is 31
median age of a myspace user is 27
media age of a facebook user is 26
media age of a linkedin user is 40
35% of twitter users live in urban areas

Follow me on Twitter: @natalieglee