In addition to my suprising lunch with the food company execs, I found another thing that was very different: that advertising folks dress and talk very differently from geeks.

Ten years ago, people sniggered when a peer said they had a date with someone they met online. The stigma seems to be lessening in American society and online dating is becoming just as viable an option as the supermarket or singles bar for making love connections. That said, most still the other one’s lying about something.

Digg.com is a geek paradise. The top story this morning asked “Remember Dungeons and Dragons 80′s cartoon?” I thought, “no. No I don’t.” But it’s been “dugg” over a thousand times. Somebody remembers. In fact, it’s a collection of somebodies, the same somebodies who helped populate the top 100 Digg.com stories of 2005. The results are fascinating—and telling.

I see the BlogHer conference dates are announced (July 28 and 29 in San Jose).

I just posted a frank talk with two of the geeks who are building MSN Search. It’s an hour long, and you’ll get a little look into how the geeks who build search engines think.

Self-proclaimed “uber geek” Daniel Guermeur, chief executive of Austin-based Metadot Corp. just made a stunning contribution to the future of yard sale “seemed like a good idea at the time” merchandise. Das Keyboard, the fruit of Guermeur’s geekdom, is based upon the “legendary” IBM Model M, with one key difference-the keys are black, and, um, blank.

This is pretty funny. Out at LinuxWorld the Google Geeks went up against the Microsoft Voles in a battle of geek wits.

In one of the more unique moves in the vertical search world, koders.com, an engine designed around the search of open source code is prepared to officially launch on Monday (5-16-05).