Defining Geekdom vs Webloggers' beliefs

The Register has a guest editorial today: O geeks, what has become of us? discussing fundamental beliefs every 'real geek' need to adhere to:

Meet a man with a pony-tail, a pasty complexion, and a faded black t-shirt emblazoned with a logo involving the word *NIX, and you will normally be able to guess his techno-politics pretty easily. For a start, he's going to resent attempts to record his emails, hate attempts to stop him swapping MP3s, and despise Microsoft's attempts to do anything at all. He's going to kick up a fuss if his ISP blocks any ports, and is likely to advocate software written under Open Source licences. Why should it be so easy to guess his mind? Well, because he's a geek, and these are things geeks believe.

Reading it made me think about whether there are similar "fundamental beliefs" among webloggers? Do we fundamentally share some values, opinions, backgrounds and/or interests?

Findings so far are not so much political but related to other "Blogoshpere laws":

• A lot of webloggers have the same staple reads


• A lot of webloggers are obsessed with their search engine rankings


• There are some core professions and/or backgrounds for a lot of webloggers, including IT people (surprise), journalists, librarians, lawyers and more


• Webloggers have some unwritten "rules" related to for example deep linking, credibility and backlinking and more.


• Among the bloggers, there is a general consensus that there is no problem with combining occational weblogging (about both personal and professional topics of interest) with working.

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