Webware

(Credit: Dipity)

Timeline creator Dipity has finally been put to a completely awesome use: a user called "tatercakes" has created a timeline of fads and memes that have surfaced on the Internet since its earliest days. And, as far as I can see, almost nothing has been left out--if you're a Dipity member, you can add to the list.

Among the chronological listings are some memes that pre-date my knowledge of the Internet ("Trojan Room coffee pot"); a few classics like All Your Base, Hampsterdance, and Peanut Butter Jelly Time; and more recent ones like lolcats and Rickrolling. Don't know what those are? Check out the timeline.

There are also a few culturally significant moments that go beyond the Web, like Stephen Colbert's White House Press Correspondents Dinner speech in 2006. The pirated C-SPAN clip of that speech taught the media industry that it's tough to put a lockdown on video that everybody wants to see, taught the White House that you should really be familiar with a comedian's schtick before booking him for a speaking engagement, and taught millions of erstwhile American Luddites about the possibilities of YouTube.

Aside from that, the list does not yet include many of the people who have arguably turned into Internet memes themselves: digitally beloved politicians like Howard Dean in 2004 and Ron Paul earlier this year, a smattering of YouTube stars, and over-the-top bloggers like Perez Hilton.

But Sen. Ted Stevens' parodied, mocked, and dance-remixed "Series of Tubes" speech was the only really glaring omission I saw, aside from a few memes that are entirely too disgusting to mention in a family-friendly context (though be warned, a few gross-outs like "Goatse" are already on the list).

It also fails to mention, at least at this point, the latest Internet meme: the Internet meme timeline.

UPDATE (6:04 a.m. PT): SourceForge's sites are back up.
UPDATE (1:27 p.m. PT): Comment from SourceForge was added.

On Wednesday morning, there appeared to be some sort of outage at SourceForge Inc., parent company of iconic geek news forum Slashdot and retailer ThinkGeek (among others). Neither SourceForge nor the sites it operates were accessible at 5:30 a.m. PT. According to SourceForge, it was an emergency maintenance window that "caused an unanticipated network outage."

As they might have said at Slashdot rival Fark, "Everybody panic!"

Performance monitoring firm Pingdom reported that Slashdot was down from 3:38 a.m. ET (12:38 am. PT) until about 8:48 a.m. (5:48 a.m. PT), slightly more than five hours.

CNET News.com received an e-mail early Wednesday morning from a reader saying "Slashdot is down and has been since late (Tuesday) night." A run through Google Blog Search yielded few results, but the Belgium-based BosIT blog had a post dated Wednesday afternoon (in that time zone) saying "Slashdot down...So is this what the end of the world looks like? It certainly is a first to my knowledge. Good luck guys!"

Another blogger said simply, "SourceForge is down." And the site for a Scotland-based software start-up called MonAmi that hosts its downloads on SourceForge's servers said, "With some unfortunate timing, it looks like the 'Axis of Openness' Web pages (SourceForge, Slashdot, Freshmeat) have gone for a burton. There seems to be some networking problems with these sites, with Web traffic timing out...This is a pain because we've just done the v0.10 release of MonAmi, and both the Web site and the file download locations are hosted by SourceForge."

Slashdot has been owned by the publicly traded SourceForge (LNUX) since 2000, when the company--then known as VA Software--acquired Slashdot operator Andover.net.

SourceForge vice president of operations Jay Seirmarco responded with an e-mail statement on Wednesday afternoon: "The datacenter serving SourceForge.net, Slashdot, Freshmeat.net and ThinkGeek had an emergency maintenance window today, starting at 1:00am PT. While datacenter maintenance windows do not usually cause service outages for these sites, this specific maintenance window caused an unanticipated network outage that lasted until about 5:45am PT, at which time service was restored," he explained.

"We are currently working with our datacenter team to determine the root cause of this outage. All sites are now operating normally and we do not anticipate any other outages related to this issue."

Those who prefer getting help from peers over negotiating the sometimes headache-inducing labyrinth of traditional tech support will have an additional online outlet come Tuesday. FixYa, a user-generated Web site for product care support, is set to announce a co-branded effort that brings Best Buy customers and the Geek Squad together to swap real-world solutions to common technical problems. Think social networking meets tech support.

Customers wanting to perform their own fixes (or trying to dig others out of trouble) can go to the Best Buy Web site and access http://geeksquad.fixya.com from the "Customer Service" tab. They can search by product, SKU, manufacturer, or product category, or post a new query and receive community troubleshooting. Solutions are free, and visitors to the site do not have to be Best Buy or Geek Squad customers.

If visitors still need "professional assistance" after querying their peers, they have access to the 17,000 Geek Squad technicians populating the site with tips and support. FixYa's community currently has more than 30,000 contributors; the Geek Squad gang will help expand that base through their own contributions.

Seattle photographer Ryan Welsh snapped this photo on Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus.

(Credit: RyanWelshPhotography.com)

If you can count on geeks for one thing, it's a creative approach to traditional things.

For example, l33tspeak as an alternative to regular language. Or LOLCats as an alternative to the usual annoying pictures of cats.

That's why I wasn't surprised to find, over at Laughing Squid, a post about a site that is now collecting images of geek graffiti.

This, if you're wondering, is a small, but growing, trend in which geeks--or folks taking on geek tendencies--tag some public place with some kind of tech-inspired message.

For example, on the West Bank side of the Israeli security wall--the same side that artist Banksy added his masterpieces of visual political commentary--someone spray-painted the oh-so-familiar term "Ctrl+Alt+Delete."

Other examples are somone's having tagged the word "Linux" over a Microsoft Windows logo in a subway station ad, and someone stenciling the binary code for the Spanish word "amor," or "love," on a Barcelona wall. At least, that's what the photographer says the binary meant. Not being a proficient binary reader, I suppose it's possible it said "hate." What do I know?

The site that's pulling these all together only has 13 examples for now, but I bet there are countless others out there, just waiting to be discovered. So if you find any really good ones, please send them to me and I might just post it here at Geek Gestalt.

On Monday night, social-news site Digg took a new approach to its famously clamorous users: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose sat down in front of a Ustream-connected camera with their MacBook Pros and a couple of beers and answered questions that had been submitted by Diggers.

As a relative outsider to Digg culture, I was fairly dissatisfied.

All in all, the session highlighted quite a few of Digg's strengths as well as troubles going forward--and additionally reflected a few common criticisms about the site as a whole. But in the process, the questions were inward-focused, dealing with the demands of an active but demanding user base. Very few dealt with Digg's place in the Web's landscape or new media industry as a whole.

Digg, like a handful of other social-media sites (Yelp and Vimeo come to mind), has become famous for a notoriously tight-knit community. On one hand, that's a sign of success. It's got a really dedicated user base. On the other hand, it invokes claims of cliquishness and complaints that it's hard for an outsider to break in.

Watching the town hall, those complaints seemed pretty grounded. Right off the bat, the 20 questions selected were chosen because of the numbers of Diggs each question amassed in a thread about the town hall. True, that's keeping it in the community, and Digg is all about the community. But it's also a bit incestuous, and the questions could have fallen prey to Digg's alleged insideriness--voting up a comment or story simply because of who posted it or submitted it, not because of the content of the stories.

And consequently, the vast majority of the stories were about the nitty-gritty details of the site, the sort of thing that would be of importance to a daily Digg user but which would be inconsequential at best (and potentially nonsensical) to an outsider. I'm not a top Digger, but I'm more than familiar with the site. Digg's users, for better or for worse, also happen to be a tech-savvy bunch. That means a tougher job for Adelson, Rose, and the rest, as the users will be more likely to demand upgrades to the service, insist on a better user experience, and the like. That's good; I'm tired of seeing Web 2.0 sites thinking that they can get away with perpetual beta phases and poor performance.

But on the other hand, Digg can't simply look inward because legitimate competitors have begun to surface. One of them, Mixx, just raised several million dollars in venture funding. None of the questions addressed on Monday night dealt with Digg's opinion of its competitors, plan for moving forward in a tough economic climate, or where Rose and Adelson see the site in five years. Granted, that's not their fault; the questions about "super-users" and comment system upgrades were, after all, what the users Dugg. But I sat through question after question about minute upgrades to the Digg comment system when I really wanted to hear about Adelson and Rose's collective vision for the site going forward.

One question did touch upon the constant gossip that Digg will get acquired. For obvious reasons, Adelson and Rose declined to comment. "We get asked this every day," was Adelson's response. "We are laser focused on the features that users want us to do, and frankly that is what we're focused on as a business right now."

Digg does have a great model for social news that, in my opinion, hasn't yet been paralleled by any other site. But it's in a bit of a Catch-22: ignore or deceive its community, and it faces mass backlash; but pander to its community too much, and it hinders its opportunities for growth as it focuses too far inward. I wanted to hear vision. I wanted to hear partnerships and developments and possibilities. What I heard instead was the gradual upgrading of the search algorithm. Maybe, because I'm not a hardcore Digger, I just don't get it.

But I appreciate that Kevin Rose is a fan of Chimay Red ale.

The Official 100 Question Geek Test

With almost 7,000 apps, Facebook has something for every kind of techie, from gamer to geek to gadgeteer. Here's a quick look at some custom-made apps self-respecting technophiles just shouldn't be without.

1. The Official 100 Question Geek Test: If you have a poster of the chemical elements, know the difference between Ubuntu and Debian, or have ever looked for Easter Eggs on a DVD, this is just the quiz for you. Go ahead, let your outer outcast shine!... Read more

When I saw Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow speak at a publishing conference in January, he made an offhand remark about how the "directory of wonderful things," one of the most popular blogs on the Web, occasionally came under fire for not being a "true blog" because it didn't allow readers to comment on entries. Comments on Boing Boing, which started as a zine and then went online in 1995, had been turned off several years ago in the wake of trolling problems.

Well, Boing Boing critics can consider themselves moot on that point--the blog has reinstated comments along with a redesign that went into effect on Tuesday morning. Additionally, there's a new Boing Boing Gadgets vertical helmed by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson.

In a post on Tuesday, Boing Boing co-editor Mark Frauenfelder hinted that more new developments are coming in the near future, too. Could more verticals be on the way, eventually leading to a full-out blog network? Boing Boing has made a name for itself by chronicling all things bizarre--common topics include steampunk culture, cryptozoology, Disney (a favorite topic of Doctorow's), Creative Commons, and news of the odd--and there's plenty of room out there for even more weirdness.

"We'd like to thank the happy mutants who helped make this major relaunch possible," Frauenfelder wrote. "These folks went under the hood and untangled the mess that Boing Boing's code had snarled into, and created an elegant, powerful system that positively shines."