Okay, so aligning myself with the Geek tribe is a stretch at best: I have described myself in the past as a Dilberttante. I am as much (or more) a consumer of the digital as I am a producer. But these things are mostly a matter of degree rather than hard delineations. Not to mention that the term “Geek” has many, many flavors to it: I am more Computer Geek than our housemate, who is more Comic Book Geek than myself. My wife is way less Computer Geek than me, about as Comic Book Geek as our housemate, and way, way more Cut Open A Cat And Sew It Back Up Without Making A Mess Geek than either of us.

Additionally, there are many facets to Geekdom other than simple skill sets. Attitude is a big part of it. Which is as much why I consider myself part of the Geek tribe as anything. A beautiful example came down the pike today from Slashdot. They featured an article about some yahoo who is trying to beat the US cross-country speed record. The person making the attempt is using any number of high-tech tools—radar and laser detectors, GPS, police scanners, thermal cameras—as part of of the endeavor.

I didn’t read the article, having little interest in one man’s attempt to inflate his withered gonads with a dangerous and ultimately illegal cross-country masturbation session. No, what really caught my eye was the tags.

Tags are descriptive words or phrases that are attached (“tagged”) to stories, blog entries, etc., to allow readers—both human and software—to easily find stories of a similar nature. An article about a recall of children’s toys manufactured in China might have tags such as “toys”, “children”, “china”, “recall”, and so forth. Slashdot has been experimenting with a tagging system for some time now: readers, rather than authors, are encouraged to submit tags for particular stories, for the elucidation of the greater readershp.

Which brings me back to this particular article about the guy attempting to break the US cross-country speed record. Below is a screen shot of the actual post on Slashdot as of 8:30 this morning. Check out the tags submitted by readers, circled in green:

I may not be able to debug a TCP stack or compile my own Linux distro, but these are definitely my people. 🙂

OOO OOO, THIS JUST IN: Just pulled this article off of Fark. What timing!