There are all kinds of sites on the Internet. There are sites for sports and gear, for politics and religion, for movies or music, for buying and selling, for just about anything that people can think, do, see, hear or dream. And, in the last couple of years, the social networking sites have become more and more important in bringing people together into online communities. While most sites accept just about anybody that will obey the rules, more and more sites are being constructed just for people with closely connected interests and outlooks. One of the most interesting of these sites is the unabashed site for Geeks, Slashdot.org.

When one stumbles on to this site for the first time it looks like a news site; not a networking site. There are articles about anything geek; computers, software, hardware, networks, tools, in short anything that might interest the friendly neighborhood Geek. Closer examination shows that these are not your typical news story by some reporter; they are more like blogs pointing towards news stories. Instead of by-lines for there are internet handles or usernames. And at the bottom of each article is the tell tale sign of a community, the number of responses to that article that show that these Geeks are communicating with one another.

The number of responses to these articles is astounding. There are twenty, thirty eighty, hundreds of responses to some of these articles. Even articles that are less than an hour old have more than twenty replies. How do they get so many replies about an article so quickly? There is another internet tool you see at Slashdot, RSS. Really simple syndication is another tool developed for news sites that is used as a communication tool on this site. An article-blog entry is posted to Slashdot; RSS picks it up and sends it out to the Geeks who set up their system to use their cell phones or blackberries or what ever other mobile devices they strap to their belts. They see the article and they respond.

While other sites may have RSS systems set up to monitor individual blogs, the Slashdot RSS system is the only one of its kind that monitors all of the blogs at one time. Leave it to the Geeks to find a way to maximize their blogging and communication, while at the same time making their site look like a news site. This could certainly make it easier to do their social networking while at work. While an employer would probably get upset if you or I spent time on MySpace or LiveJournal while you were supposed to be working, who is going to get upset at an IT guy keeping up to date on the latest server issue or Trojan infection going around?

While non-geeks spend their networking time worrying about the downloading the latest video or sharing the hottest music files, Geeks are interested in computers, systems integration, and other IT issues. The thing that makes them Geeks in the first place is their love of these systems. Does it not make sense that these Geeks would have a networking site where computer networks are as important as human networks? Is it any wonder that they have taken a site like Slashdot, RSS and their personal communication devices to set up a social networking site that is particularly suited to Geeks? Of course not, they are Geeks after all, and that is what Geeks do.