Check Please!
Brian Briggs

High-Tech Humorist Ventures Offline with BBook of Geek

INTERVIEWS | NOV. 10, 2008

The internet is a wellspring of geeky information, drawing together virtual communities of technically inclined folk sharing a common knowledge of the important stuff, such as overclocking and the biological habits of the tribble. But while the accumulation of vast amounts of knowledge (and trivia) is a mainstay for hardcore internet denizens, even the geekiest among us may occasionally need to look something up. The BBook of Geek, by tech humor guru Brian Briggs of BBspot.com, is designed to fill this niche.

The BBook of Geek is a compilation of essential information for the average internet denizen, according to Briggs.

"It's broken up into 128 topics in 8 categories of geekdom: Software, Hardware, Internet, TV, Movies, Gaming, Literature and Science," said Briggs. "Each topic has two pages dedicated to it: a fact page, which has "facts" and a picture of me as the topic. The second page is BBspot-like content of a fake news story, top 11, quiz or song parody."

For those concerned about leaving their monitors for the world of ink and paper, it even comes installed with hexadecimal page numbers to ease the transition.

BBspot has been a top tech humor website almost since its launch in 2000. The site originally focused primarily on satire tech news, but has since branched out into a range of content including comics, movie trailer reviews, and the very popular 'Top Eleven' lists.

"When I started the site, I was basically sitting around thinking that there must be something better to do with my time than to watch TV," he said. "I put up some stories on some free Web space provided by Comcast. My wife said that we should hold off on getting our own domain, until we saw that I was going to stick with it."

Stick with it he did: the site did so well, in fact, that in less than two years Brian was able to quit his day job at a small industrial computer company and make BBspot his career.

"There wasn't much more room for advancement at my day job, working on the site was much more fun for me, and it was doing well enough that we decided to take the leap," said Briggs. "The month before the transition was scary, but the site income ramped up pretty quickly. I don't regret the decision at all."

BBook of Geek

Today, BBspot brings in well over a million pageviews a month. With his impeccable geek credentials, drawing upon BBspot's rich mine of material to create a definitive reference seemed a logical step for Briggs.

"About 20-25% of the book is content previously published on BBspot," said Briggs. "The rest is all new. And putting together the book was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the experience of creating it, and hope to be able to do it again. With ad revenue harder to come by online, it would be great to have another revenue stream to count on. I hope this book opens some new opportunities for me. It's an exciting time."

At a time when many websites are concentrating on increasingly multimedia content, BBspot remains a fairly traditional site.

"I'd say we're a bit old school now. The hot humor sites are all concentrating a lot of effort in online video. I don't have the resources or the desire to do that, so I'll be sticking with good old words."

If The BBook of Geek is any indication, that's just fine. And for those concerned about leaving their monitors for the world of ink and paper, it even comes installed with hexadecimal page numbers to ease the transition.