It's geek, not nerd, damnit

I thought he was our Che Guevara

YearlyKos leaps the Atlantic!
by Plutonium Page
Sun Jun 11, 2006 at 08:24:42 AM PDT

No, you didn't miss a secret conference in some swanky European hotel - nothing that exciting. However, it's kind of cool that the UK's Observer has picked up the story:

For many, they are the nerds of US politics: laptop warriors, with brains full of statistics, no social life and devoting too much time to arcane policy details.

But last week the political blogger - someone who runs an online journal - emerged into the mainstream and shed the stereotype in the glare and glitz of a Las Vegas casino. At their helm was former soldier Markos Moulitsas. At the age of 34, Moulitsas has progressed from private policy nerd to one of the best- known public voices in Democratic politics, described last week on Time.com as 'the left's own Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara rolled into one'.

Thousands of bloggers gathered last week in the Riviera to exchange ideas, debate and plot their steady takeover of journalism and political debate from newspapers, magazines and television.

Anyone who thinks blogging is over-rated should have looked at the guest list of power players who followed the blogging herd to Las Vegas to woo and be wooed by these latest additions to the political scene. Reporters and columnists from all the main newspapers showed up, as did Democratic strategists. Even potential Democrat candidates for the 2008 presidential election pitched up to network and sell their political wares to the online community. Although the event was meant to appeal to all parties, its guest list was overwhelmingly liberal.

Hey, "nerd" is a compliment, don't you think? And what's that about no social life? Looks like the world knows how awesome nerds bloggers really are now.

Check out the whole article. It's sort of goofy, but it's still neat that the world is reading about us.

Here's another open thread. Enjoy.

We once had this discussion on Netslaves.

Nerds are asocial people who prize their techincal comptence. Nerds congregate in places like Ars Technica or the New Republic or your various MMO's. They don't like interaction. Your prototypical nerd is a programmer or engineer. Government nerds work on the Hill and learn to play golf. They don't socialize much in an open environment like Yearly Kos.

In short, these are people captive to their obessions

Geeks are different.Geeks are the people at Linux installs who then head for a bar. They're the women who both obsess over their iPod and frequent Sephora. They have odd interests which they share with people.

The bloggers who went to Yearly Kos are geeks,not nerds. They like people, they like odd things, but they aredriven by interests, not obsessions. They are as likely to talk to your about Thai cooking as polling data.

Bo social life? Well, Jen and I do get out.I work a lot on the blog, but the only arcane policy debate this weekend was between who impressed least, England or Portugal.

Geeks like to get out and do things, Nerds like controlled environments. A nerd convention would have been held in DC, not Vegas, America's sin city, the land ot "what happens here,it stays here".

No, that's for geeks.