A year ago today, we launched Geekosystem with the goal of “unit[ing] all of the tribes of geekdom under one common banner.” And I think we’ve been pretty successful to that end. Despite cold-launching with zero marketing budget and an editorial staff of exactly two people, myself and Susana Polo, we’ve built a great community of readers, and the site reaches an audience of comfortably more than one million people each month. So we’d like to thank you, Geekosystem reader, for your excellent and discerning taste in websites, and for helping make the site what it is today.
OK: We’ll take a little credit too. In this past year, we have:
- Auto-Tuned a vuvuzela;
- Shown that BioShock was anticipated by Batman: The Animated Series in 1994;
- Broken the news of Cryptome’s fight with its ISP over its publication of Microsoft’s online surveillance guide;
- Broken the news that there was a dirty UNIX joke in the New York Times;
- Asked prominent geeks whether they were on Team Edward or Team Jacob, and gotten some interesting replies;
- Sussed out the truth about a real scientific theorem invented by a Futurama writer for use in an episode;
- Investigated in depth the rebellion against Digg v4;
- Spent an entire day making trollquotes solely to enrage geeks;
- And last but not least, covered a year in which some amazing things happened in technology.
Two days after we launched, Apple unveiled a little device called the iPad; this set the stage for a year in which mobile would explode, Facebook would crack 500 million members (and inspire a movie that’s likely to win Best Picture), once-farfetched technologies like 3D would break into the mass market, and, as the year drew to a close and 2011 kicked in, Internet startups would hit their hottest in years, with Foursquare valued at $250 million, Groupon at $15 billion, Facebook at over $50 billion, and, perhaps more impactfully, smaller innovators having a better go at attracting attention and funding.
Oh, and if you were wondering what our most popular post was this year, it was this set of pictures of a fake capsizing boat, which netted more than 750,000 hits. Thanks, Internet.
Early this year, we’ll be happy to welcome into this world a sister site called The Mary Sue (http://TheMarySue.com), which Susana will run; the site will bring a female sensibility to the appraisal of geekdom, and will explore comics, sci-fi, anime, and narrative fiction with a greater depth than Geekosystem. (You can read some more of Susana’s thoughts about The Mary Sue in this interview with Poynter.org.) But Geekosystem will by no means turn into an all-boys club, and we’ll continue to report on tech, Internet culture, and strange and wonderful things.
It’s been an exciting year to read and write about the things we read and write about, the site has grown far beyond our expectations during Year One, we’ve got lots in store for Year Two, and we hope you’ll join us. Excelsior!
(title cupcake via mickeychor’s Flickr)
