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What is an Geek? Is Geek a pejor­at­ive term?

In the UK, being a train­spot­ter or anorak is def­in­itely pejor­at­ive for those out­side the craze.  Duncan Riley uses the mar­ket­ing term Prosumer (pro­fes­sional consumer).

If any­one comes up to me and calls me a Geek, I am proud. Hav­ing spent the last year break­ing off the shackles of “sales and mar­ket­ing droid”, being a geek is refresh­ing. And hav­ing suc­cess­fully passed on my geek genes to Liam — I am even prouder.

Self-proclaiming myself as a geek with the title Pro­fes­sional Geek still gets side­ways glances — even at Microsoft — which has spent the last many years suc­cess­fully becom­ing the enter­prise soft­ware com­pany. Thank­fully, Microsoft’s heart still beats with a geek tune.

So what is the size of the geek vir­tual nation? This is a nation not divided by 19thC lim­its of Empire; nor sep­ar­ated by age, gender, lan­guage. A geek has a under­stand­ing over the last 250 years, tech­no­logy has pro­pelled humans at a rapid rate. The inform­a­tion age we live in may be seen as a dif­fer­ent time to the indus­trial age — who can pre­dict future historian’s categorizations?

There are two recent meas­ure­ments of the size of the geek vir­tual nation as it exists today:

• Apple PR: Down­loads of Apple’s Safari 3 beta for Win­dows 2000, XP and Vista: 1,000,000
  Who else apart from geeks, inde­pend­ent of plat­form reli­gion, would down­load a beta of yet another browser?
• Piper Jaf­fray estim­ates 500,000 iPhones sold on the week­end.
  Most estim­ates put the US at 50% of the world’s IT eco­nomy. 2 x 500,000 = 1,000,000

Whilst both num­bers are Apple-centric, it is still an inter­est­ing num­ber to pon­der. How many bor­der­less, hyper-online geeks are there in the world?