Geeks-R-Us: 2005 In Review
By Aaron Bailey in Miscellaneous on Dec 29, 2005 4:35PM
It may seem like Chicagoist is cool, but really we're big time nerds. We get off on geeky new gadgets and websites and blogs. And we're not ashamed of it either. Let's look back at the nerdiest Chicago-area things that caught our attention in 2005.
Our Biggest Nerd Crush went to Adrian Holovaty, internet wizard and co-creator of chicagocrime.org. We met him at an event and all of us were clearly drooling at how nerdy cute he (and chicagocrime.org) is. He's since moved on to a job at WashingtonPost.com, while working from his condo in Chicago. Yes, we're jealous.
We Wish We Worked At 400 North May Street, home to two very cool companies. Coudal Partners does all sorts fun online stuff like the Society for HandHeld Hushing, the Museum of Online Museums, and Jewelboxing. 37signals makes our favorite web apps -- Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboard, and Ta-Da List. Coudal distracts us from work with their movies and puzzles while 37signals helps us gain back that lost time. It's a wash from the companies at 400 N. May.
The It's About Freaking Time Award goes to the Chicago Tribune for finally joining the internet revolution and publishing article RSS feeds.
And while we're on the topic of RSS feeds, We Couldn't Live Without Feedburner, a company that is enabling publishers -- big and small -- to publish their content in "Really Simple Syndication" format. In 2005, if a website didn't have a feed, we didn't bother reading them.
The Product We Hope They Vastly Improve in 2006 is Motorola's rather lame ROKR phone, with iTunes (sorta). What's up with the 100 song limit? We'd love to buy one of these puppies, but our music selection is larger than 100 songs. We don't care if you have to kidnap Steve Jobs to make it happen.
In 2006, we'll be watching skinnyCorp's Extra Tasty and the Chicago Daily News.
And finally, serious honorable mention props go out to our favorite Chicago bloggers and writers: Gapers Block, Zorn and Zulkey. Thanks for keeping us on our toes, for stealing our links without attribution and for letting us steal yours.
Here's to an even nerdier 2006.