Approaching Geekdom

Throughout middle school and often throughout high school, geeks are the outsiders. We are isolated and alone near the bottom of the social order. This happens for a variety of reasons. It can be because others feel intimidated by our intelligence or because we doesn’t feel a need to play the social games necessary to become one of the popular crowd. Whatever the reason, geeks become the outcasts in many social situations.

While geeks tend to be outsiders socially, one place where we dominate is in our understanding of technology. We’re often far ahead of our peers in our grasp on computers and other electronic devices. A large part of the internet is dominated by geek culture, and the internet has allowed us, as geeks, to break out of our isolation and find other linkminded people all over the world. Geeks tend to think of the internet as ours.

Myspace, however, is an encroachment by the old order on to an arena that the geeks consider their own. Myspace is a bastion of the same rumor-mongering popularity contests that made up junior high and high school. Instead of being a place dominated by geeks, it’s a place where anyone can set up their own personal presence on the internet without having to have any technical knowledge or expertise whatsoever.

Myspace brings the horrors of middle school drama to the internet. For me, at least, middle school was one of the worst periods of my life. I don’t feel any huge need to go back to that by becoming a part of the myspace culture.

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While the release date for Firefox 3 hasn’t been announced yet, Mozilla is going to attempt to create a Guinness world record for the most software downloaded in one day. They are attempting to create a Download Day on the day that Firefox 3 is released. It’s a fun idea, and the new version of Firefox has some excellent changes that improve the program.

If you’re already using Firefox, you might as well upgrade to the newest version when it comes out. If you aren’t using Firefox yet, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Download Firefox right now.

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The title of this blog is Approaching Geekdom. I certainly consider myself a geek, and I know many other people who take pride in claiming the title of geek for themselves. Still, the term isn’t easy to define.

One of the things that makes being a geek a hard term to define is the sheer number of different types of geeks there are. The picture below shows just a few of the hundreds of different types of geeks. Click on the image to see the larger version.

So, with all these numerous, very different types of people all being classified as geeks, what is it that makes them geeks?

In my opinion, a geek is someone who devotes him/herself to the things that he/she enjoys. A geek can enjoy just about anything. Sports, comic books, music, or cars all have their share of geeks. What is important is that the geek spends their time and energy exploring and learning about the things they enjoy.

The things that I enjoy are varied. I love books and movies, computers, video and role playing games. The things that I enjoy are important enough to me that I want to spend my time to create a blog about them.

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Social music services are a new, interesting way to find and listen to music. A new service called jango is now in a closed beta. Many people are already aware of social music services such as last.fm and Pandora. The idea behind such services is that they play music based on the user’s input into what he or she likes. They provide recommendations into similar artists based on what other people who like that artist like. Generally, the more you listen to the provided station, the better it gets, as it more closely matches your tastes with those of others.

I spent some time working with jango, and I was very impressed by the interface, the music recommendations, and pretty much everything else about the site. The site uses a large amount of Ajax, making it easy to navigate around the social areas of the site without ever stopping the music. This can be done easily without needing to have open the player in a pop-up window. The social parts of the site made it easy to find and play other people’s stations and to connect with people who have musical interests similar to yours.

The ability to edit stations offered an amount of control over your stations. You can easily add artists and rate songs. The system will ever recommend artists similar to those already added to your stations.

In my opinion, last.fm beats Pandora on social networking aspects, while Pandora beats last.fm on the music recommendations and control over stations. Using jango, it beat both of them across the board. Considering it’s still in a early beta, I can’t wait to see what features get released before it’s ready for the general public.

If you want to try out jango, leave me a comment saying so and I’ll email you an invite to the beta. I’ve only got three at the moment, so it’ll be first come, first served.

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Meebo recently released an extension for Firefox. If you haven’t used Meebo before, it allows you to use almost any instant messenger client straight from your browser. It works similarly to desktop based programs like Trillian or Gaim/Pidgin, but from your browser. This allows you to connect to all of your IM accounts from any computer with internet without installing any programs.

You can get the Meebo extension for Firefox here. The extension adds a couple of very nice features. It gives you a sidebar with all of your buddies and provides visual notifications whenever a buddy IMs you. It also makes it possible to drag and drop links directly from a web page onto one of your buddies. The extension makes using Meebo from your browser even easier and more convenient. My only complaint (and it’s really a very minor complaint) is that using the extension still requires having Meebo.com open in a tab or window. It would be nice for the service to be completely integrated into the extension, but that’s probably a bit much to hope for.

Meebo is a great way to use instant messaging, and the Firefox extension makes Meebo even easier to use. Knowing how much effort the Meebo team has made to include dozens of excellent features in Meebo, I imagine the extension will only grow more powerful with time.

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