For a politician, getting exposure on CNN or in the New York Times is a sign that the political world has noticed you. It says, "Now, you're somebody".
For a geek, there are also certain things web-related that really matter in a similar way. Today, to my surprise, I achieved my geeky "moment in the sun".
Yesterday I saw a post from Joe Crawford, who posts to, among other sites, the San Diego Blog (http://sandiegoblog.com/). I would highly recommend this blog to any and all of you living in or interested in San Diego. Anyway, he posted a story from a Chinese news source regarding their government's developement of the Ipv9 protocol. It's a story only a geek would find fascinating. I did, so I researched the topic a bit further. It seems there was a prank pulled online a couple of years ago regarding this topic, but that was when Ipv6 wasn't even a reality, so it was a good joke at that time. But I also found serious references to the work by the Chinese on this protocol, so, on a whim, decided to submit the story to Slashdot.
This morning I brought up Slashdot, as is my usual practice, and to my surprise the story made the number two spot on the main page. Whoohoo. My 15 kilobytes of geeky fame. Meanwhile, the original site has now been Slashdotted and will probably be down until the owners figure out what the hell happened to them. Perhaps they'll fear their own government was responsible.
My only other geeky bragging point is that I hold positions 1,2,4,5,6 and 7 on the page returned for a Google search of "jeber". That would be a really cool bragging point if I weren't honest with myself enough to admit that only friends, family and myself are ever going to bother to Google for jeber. But still...