Sexy geek couple: photo of Veronica Belmont and Ryan Block by Laughing Squid.
They were the nerdy ones. A little off. Quiet. They spent too much time in their heads… But now, their mad geek skillz have made them into nail-biting, thigh-clenching, blog-burning, mouse-melting h4wtness. If you could see their brains, you’d gasp “it’s so big!” before the porn music wakka-wakka could even begin.
Researched and culled all year, then boiled down with nominations and my own personal invention: the patent-pending, steam-powered, drink-dispensing, algorithmic GILF-o-tron 9000 — it’s the Top Ten Sexy Geeks of 2007.
I got an inbox full of nominations — thank you! Take a walk down sexy geek memory lane and ask where they are now (2005, 2006), as many selections were not yet web luminaries, and that’s the score. No one from the previous top ten are allowed, it’s got to stay fresh. It’s a personality-driven list. This list is my choosing: no celebrities who likely wouldn’t talk to you at a party, no voting or committee (and no exploits like hacking or stuffing), and they’ve got to have geek integrity. It’s like this: you’ve got to be able to imagine them breaking your iPhone and talking dirty about firmware upgrades — in your bed.
This year was tough: being a sexy geek is the new new new black. Example: the Girls of Nerdcore being not as nerdy as they seem.
Runners up include:
* Clunky Robot (hot geek artist, accent on the robots)
* Zadi Diaz (we’re friends, and I have *inappropriate* thoughts about Ms. JetSet, Epic-Fu and Smashface)
* Chuck Olsen (Mr. Blogumentary is also HOT)
* Bonny Pierzina (adorable and sexy host/producer of NoodleScar)
* Tantek Celik (gorgeous and seriously smart: from Technorati to Microformats)
* Vu Bui (total cutie Flickrazzi photographer of geeks and producer of NoodleScar)
* Nikki Nefarious (photographer, performance artist and webmistress/community manager for SocialKink.com)
* J.R. Blackwell (hottie writer, photographer, podcaster and contortionist)
* Brian Lam (handsome and self-effacing, intense gadget geek: Gizmodo)
* Daniel Graf (easy-on-the-eyes founder of Kyle.tv)
* Ryan Block (the editor-in-chief of Engadget, founder of Joystiq and taken: but he’s also an unrelentingly sexy geek)
I see you at the parties, on the intertubes, in my dreams. Oh, you sexy geeks — this is my dirty nerdc0re rap song with your name in the refrain, this is the regifted Google schwag I lay at your pale feet in offering — this is the fanfic I write in my head (where you or I play Angelina in “Hackers” alternately) late at night after I’ve drooled on your Twitters. Again. Sexiest geeks, in reverse order:
Photo by Lane Hartwell.
10. Kurt Collins
Deep, handsome and seriously all over the place in the 2.0, he’s behind the scenes and powering tech companies like ProfileLinker — oh, and that successful site you might have heard of, Photobucket. He’s been a developer and engineer at outfits such as cNet and is fluent in many romance languages, like DHTML, AJAX, CSS, PHP, MySQL and Ruby. Um, whatever. He’s totally hot when he’s making noises that I think are English, but I’m just sort of drooling…
Photo via TechieDiva.
9. Gina Hughes
Chief editor and founder of TechieDiva — I can haz mad crush on you! It’s tough to read between the lines of this delicious gadget nerd’s popular blog when her photos are so distracting. A former Marine (!), code and tech-obsessed geek, and columnist for Yahoo Tech, she’s become one of the foremost female voices and experts on gadgets and consumer tech — while just getting sexier by the minute.
Photo by Joi Ito.
8. Sean Bonner
Tattooed, always up for an internet fight, relentlessly sexy, unafraid to be goofy and wonderfully funny: he’s a hardcore blogger and one of the main men behind worldwide community blogging phenom, Metroblogging. Los Angeles based, he cofounded Bode Media Inc., got the LAPD’s blog up and running, is a huge grassroots journalism advocate and has spoken about it everywhere from Wired to CBS News — and is a web prankster. His hotness and smarts combination is really sort of unfair.
Photo by Brian Solis.
7. Leah Culver
Her successful stunt was to raise money to buy a new Macbook Pro by selling surface real estate on the front of her new machine to friends and advertisers (video). But the computer science grad, lead developer and cofounder of Pownce is pixie-cute and smart as a whip. Also, it’s hard not to have a crush on a yummy girl who hates widgets.
Photo by Laughing Squid.
6. Jonathan Grubb
He’s lead design teams for Yahoo and Vodaphone, but that’s just his Clark Kent guise: the true inner sexy geek came to the fore when he cofounded and became design director for Rubyredlabs. Grubb is a restless Gemini obsessed with interaction design for mobile devices — who is also irresistibly sexy and what’s even worse, he makes cute and creepy art.
Photo by luismuna.com.
5. Tanja Andrews
Drop-dead gorgeous Bay Area foodhacker Andrews stuns with her deft, extensive knowledge of raw foods and the science of making them fun, easy and yummy — but also her superb online branding, and superlative vlogging skills. She’s funny, brainy, adventurous, devoted to her vlog and she *is* Freshtopia. Did I mention that she’s sexy top to bottom and dresses to stop traffic?
4. Dino Dai Zovi
This year, the NY-based hacker took home a fat $10K prize for hijacking a MacBook Pro; he’s also a security consultant, developer and author of papers — cute even in grainy pics, he’s prone to be credited for crazy notions like that Vista’s code is more secure than Mac’s. It doesn’t matter: he’s pretty hot, he’s got little to no online visual presence, and he cracked a Mac at a security conference. That’s trouble.
Photo via Ariel Waldman’s photostream.
3. Ariel Waldman
Originally hailing from Kansas, her recent arrival in San Francisco has been a problem — for pretty much every tech geek with a libido, male, female, silicon-based or feline. She’s outrageously sexy just by being quietly snarky-yet-sweet, not quite hiding the hot throbbing brain that has her writing for Engadget and Suicide Girls, being the community manager at Pownce, and specializing in social media insight consulting (which means she knows way more about 2.0 community interactions and P2P marketing than you do). She is also silly, and adventurous, and utterly delicious.
Photo by roadsideguide.
2. MC Frontalot
New York based (base) Frontalot isn’t a n00b to the scene, but it wasn’t until I saw him perform here in San Francisco that I felt the waves of unbridled, teeming, rampant, slightly palm-damp sexuality coming from the godfather of nerdc0re rap. (I just made that up.) That man can perform, he’s insanely panties-on-the-stage h4wt in his glasses and headlamp and tie, and he drops lines about things so well-researched and utterly geeky that after the show you’ll think you were violated in every port you didn’t even know you had by the MIT cheerleader and football squads (if they existed). Your brain and booty will be sore in all the right ways. I just know he’s too much nerd for one girl to handle. But we can try.
Photo by Lan Bui.
1. Veronica Belmont
This stunning tech veteran has seen and done more tech-related new media than you can shake a Wii at, and her breadth of knowledge about tech and tech (and gaming) culture might just distract you from her gorgeousness for a minute. She’s more than those cute talking head tech babes; she speaks with serious substance on shows ranging from The MacCast to Attack of the Show, and currently is the host and producer of Mahalo Daily. Girls like her are seldom single for long (she’s not), but it never hurts to gaze longingly at her tasty-looking… show.
Update: Adrants provides their concurrent analysis of this year’s list (!), Doc Searls posts it on his Harvard edu law blog (!), GeekLike gives the list a nod, MySpace runs it as a news item (?), Scott Beale gives linklove on Laughing Squid as does Jen Meyers of deliberatepixel — and I’ve been informed that someone tried to put it on Digg last night but that my site has been blocked by Digg. Which is weird considering that last year it was “dugg” no problem. But then, Kevin Rose was on it last year, so maybe that’s not so weird. :)
