We basically spent an hour looking at YouTube and Google videos both great and small and playing around with Windows Media Center’s Windows Dancer application. A videotaped dancer spins around like Mr. Clippy while you play music. The software tries to do beat detection on the song to synch up the video with your music. It’s pretty cheesy. It was obvious that we were totally geeking out and needed a public outlet to unleash the frustration of being an ubergeek with no place to go…

We used to work at Proxicom, a once-dead but recently revived Web consulting firm and we still had other contacts in the industry so Silvio did a lot of legwork and got them all together. Fantastic has been the only word I’ve used describe it. In some ways, a Geekout Summit is the total antidote to techie boredom. It’s pure nonmarket activity — knowledge sharing at its most collegial. Frankly, I haven’t blogged about the Geekout Summit because Silvio has put so much effort into it and didn’t want to be a budinsky about things but it looks its finally time to reach out beyond our original circles and try to get more geeks to come on by and discuss their obsessions.

I know nonprofit techies have a lot of obsessions so here are some ground rules (for those you are who such ubergeeks they need Powerpoint to discuss things)

1. Use Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint. No more than ten slides, no longer than twenty minutes and no font smaller than thirty points…
2. Please use humor in your presentation. Ideally, you ought to be able to take a step back from your obsession and recognize it as such. Hey, self-reflexive geekdom is much, MUCH cooler than the uh, normal kind.
3. Visual aids are MUCH better than presenting the audience with a bunch of XML/RDF code. I mean, that’s VERY sexy and all, but think of this as a show and tell to a college-educated crowd.

Some uber geek topics we haven’t seen yet: space elevator, cosplay, nerds who know how to hack automobile software, discussion of the technological singularity (“rapture of the nerds”), LOTR, geocaching, VOIP, VXML, latest nerd glossary as it applies to TV series fandom, turntablism, your best Weird Al impression, Roomba mods, etc. etc. If you’re a Make magazine reader (or even better, you’ve submitted an article) then come on down. If you read Gizmodo’s Low End Theory column and you wanna show off some decidedly low-tech piece of crap, come to the next one too.