Culture http://www.webupon.com/tags/Culture New posts about Culture Attention Geeks and Nerds: Use These Sites to Become Super Geeks and Nerds http://www.webupon.com/Web-Talk/Attention-Geeks-and-Nerds-Use-These-Sites-to-Become-Super-Geeks-and-Nerds.65739 Increase your intellectual dominance:

The Learn List

Can you use every tool on the learn list? If not; how will you ever design the perfect website to hypnotize a horde of internet users and build up an army to attack Microsoft with? Also remember W3schools for more web for world domination.

Programming Tutorials

How many programming languages have you mastered this week? Use this amazing site to master the few programming languages you don't know yet.

Safari Books Online

Really good books! Instead of buying one or two books at a time buy a whole library for the same price.

Lecturefox

How about a free university lecture on a geeky subject like: Collective intelligence or electronics on plastic. You can find many subjects with hundreds of lectures in video audio or text. Lectures are from universities like MIT, Oxford and many more.

You already think like a geek, now look like one:

ThinkGeek

Every geek knows ThinkGeek but here are a few categories' you need for your new improved super nerd/geek image:

Design Loot

Visit them for a few really good nerd shirts.

Make money the nerd way:

Make money to buy all your geek gadgets.

Ideas!

Plant a few smart ideas in your over-sized brain for making money. Then use them to finance your plan of world domination.

Triond

Use your superior geek knowledge to create content and then get paid properly. Any content accepted; video, articles, pictures and more.

e-Monetized

Now you know to design the perfect site, but how do you use it to make money? eMonetized is your answer.

Now that you have the money; buy the gear:

J-box

Let's face it; all the best gadgets and gear comes from Japan. Jbox is a store specializing in Japanese toys, figurines, Japanese pop culture items and more. Hello kitty vibrating shoulder massageranyone?

Dealextreme

This is my favorite gadget site! They are cheaper than dirt, offer better service than Santa and offer worldwide free shipping on all products. If the previous category didn't work for you this is the site to use. Sometimes you get the same gadgets ThinkGeek offers but at a fraction of the price.

Think Geek

Once again, what geek or nerd can live without a ThinkGeek gadget or two?

A few I like:

  • Prove you're a real nerd by solving an Irregular IQ Cube
  • Fight your geek friends the geek way with these
  • Something to keep you company 2:30 in the morning when you're programming the next great piece of p2p software: Glow Brick

Other sites geeks and nerds can't go without:

Slashdot For all your daily nerd news.

Boing Boing Your original “directory of wonderful things”, a group blog.

Linux Questions Because nerds don't like the evil of Microsoft.

Online Alarm Clock Never oversleep, you've got things to program and people to im.

Conclusion

There are millions of sites geeks and nerds could potentially like or use but I don't know half of them. If you do on the other hand; feel free to comment and add them to this admittedly limited list.

Remember to take a break between your 12 hour programming or web surfing marathons.

]]> Mon, 10 Dec 2007 02:39:29 PST Blogging and the Myspace Generation: Gatecrashing Someone Else’s Therapy Session http://www.webupon.com/Blogging/Blogging-and-the-MySpace-Generation-Gatecrashing-Someone-Elses-Therapy-Session.60994 I've long been a fan of the Internet, and have been on line for the best part of a decade now. The thing that appealed the most to begin with was the availability of information. As the Internet grew, it wasn't simply the availability of information that was significant, but also the availability of objects: I set up my eBay account in 1999 and it was nothing short of a revelation. All the books, records, videos, CDs I had dreamed of owning but had never been able to locate were all suddenly there, within reach. All of this is still true, although the global village has shrunk in my mind and my amazement at it has diminished as my familiarity has grown. But the Internet has evolved and mutated, as any society and culture does over time.

I've only relatively recently checked out the whole blogging thing: I never really saw the need or understood its purpose, at least fully. But then, it's only recently that I've investigated the social networking scene, too. In both instances, my assumptions have been proven wrong, on many levels, by many people. Social networking can be used for purposes other than being a glorified communal / public text / email centre for school kids to compare notes on the exchanges made while having a crafty fag behind the bike sheds or getting pissed round at Kelly's house on Friday night while her parents are away. Similarly a lot of blogs have surprised me, being well-written and well-considered, informed pieces of writing.

But then I've also encountered an awful lot of outpourings that have confirmed and even surpassed my worst fears. We live in a solipsistic egocentric age. Yes, it's the MYSpace generation. And it's MY space, and I'LL put whatever the hell I like on it. Fine. I'm all for freedom of expression, even when it's poorly expressed, uninformed bilge. But really, the centre of the universe must be a very crowded place.

I blame the parents - the ones who never discipline their children, because they're too special and precious and they're only expressing themselves, etc., while chugging the contents of the drinks cabinet and setting fire to the sheepskin rug at the age of seven. I blame the media: it's all about you... you're worth it. And so on. You'd have thought the emo kids would have a little more empathy, being in touch with their emotions and all. But no.

They're only in touch with their own wants (which they mistake for needs... they need an iPod, they need to go to McDonald's with their friends and hang around outside with their underpants on display while chowing on some ground-up carcass of an animal that was reared on land that was rainforest not so long ago). Selfishness? Well there's nothing wrong with that, it's what makes the you different... It's a tough world and if you don't stand up for yourself, then you'll get trampled on, need to get ahead in life, put yourself first. And so on.

But really, without dropping in a swathe of quotations to illustrate my point, suffice it to say that I for one feel quite uncomfortable reading in such detail about people's break-ups, their feuds, their long-running feuds with exes. I'm not saying that the personal can't be universal, and can appreciate unreservedly how, say, the blog of a cancer sufferer can be empowering and cathartic for both the writer and the readers, especially those in the same kind of situation. But that takes us back to the well-written blogs.

Such blogs transcend the mundane, and serve a real social purpose. This is one of the medium's great strengths: it has immediacy. Moreover, it connects the writer and their audience directly. But a good blogger writes the personal with an awareness of the universal. The bad blogger can't see beyond the end of their own nose and gives names and details that fall to meaningless due to a lack of explanation or context, instead focusing on the minutiae of he said / she said etc. and oh, the self-pity!

Believe it or not, I was a teenager once. I was prone to maudlin bouts, black holes of despair that would manifest themselves "artistically." Most of it was, naturally, bilge. Easy to say with hindsight, perhaps, but the difference between my scribblings - and those of countless others for decades, centuries, millennia - and those of the MeMeMeSpace generation is that they remained private.

Yes, we were embarrassed. A particularly cringeworthy diary entry would be torn out, shredded and burned the next morning, and no-one was any the wiser. Now, half the world's read about it by the time one wakes up, and I'm not entirely sure who's the more awkward and embarrassed, the writer or the reader. Certainly, as a reader I often feel I've overstepped the mark, and that I'm not gaining an insight into someone's life in a way that I can apply in a universal context, so much as stumbled into someone else's therapy session and been signaled to pull up a chair.

If there is a point to all this, or a lesson to be learned, it's probably this: think before you type and click to submit.

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