Imagine hundreds of hardcore geeks sitting at computers in one room—ready, willing, and able to help solve your tech problems. Whether it's a new smartphone, a streaming video service, or a cloud-based backup that is driving you nuts, these folks can figure it out.

They're in a chat room affiliated with the tech-focused podcast network based in Northern California called TWIT. It can be accessed by anyone with a Web browser and once you log in, you've tapped into a global braintrust. The chat room is hosted on TWIT's servers, but it's basically independent, run by dedicated volunteers around the world. It began as an adjunct to a local radio show that TWIT founder Leo Laporte did in the mid-1990s. Today, there are often as many as 1,000 geeks inside who sometimes refer to themselves as the TWIT Army.

Leo Laporte

"They're the wise-ass kids at the back of the class who know everything that's going on," said Laporte, who hosts several of TWIT's 20-plus podcasts and is also heard nationally on the Premier Radio Network. "The chat room has turned out to be a very useful tool because if I don't know the answer [to a tech question], they either know the answer off the top of their heads or they research it and come back with links."

Laporte monitors the chat room on a 42-inch TV monitor, one of 10 screens he looks at while doing podcasts or the radio show. TWIT recently moved into a new 6,000-square-foot facility in Petaluma, Calif. The company has $10 million in annual revenue, according to Laporte, enough to rival NPR and the other major podcast creators.

TWIT streams live video of its podcasts as they are recorded and chatters comment as they watch. But the chat room is active 24/7. Laporte says it's most useful during live broadcasts of his syndicated terrestrial radio show on Saturday and Sunday, The Tech Guy, which features calls from frustrated and stumped listeners.

TWIT Monitors

"I've often said that the radio show is not me answering questions but a user group where we've all kind of gathered together to help each other," Laporte told PCMag.

On a recent episode, Laporte spoke with a listener who was spending $84 a year to rent a cable modem. Laporte pointed out that the caller could buy his own cable modem for $70, at which point someone in the chat room posted a link to a list of cable modems approved by the caller's Internet service provider.

Lillian Banchik, a Long Island surgeon known in the chat room as Dr. Mom, frequently ends up in private chat, often to decline requests for medical advice. She once spent an hour in private chat with someone who helped figure out why her husband's iMac was crashing. Banchik says that as helpful as some chat room regulars are, they can get a bit snarky when call-ins to The Tech Guy admit doing something lame, like clicking on a link that results in their computers being disabled by ransomware.

"Some of us will type 'Oopsie' when that happens," said Dr. Mom.

Laporte said most chat room vets are using Internet Relay Chat software, which is also popular with hackers and open source software projects. IT professionals who are sitting around and waiting for something to happen at work often keep their IRC client open.

TWIT chat room screen shot

That's what emilytheStrange does sometime at work. Keeping in mind the famous 1993 New Yorker magazine cartoon that proclaimed "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog," I will not make any assumptions about emilytheStrange's gender. The strange one revealed that she/he works at Nokia, helping companies such as Verizon and AT&T "get their systems set up, helping install required software on their servers etc." Asked to assess the level of tech knowledge among TWIT chatters, emilytheStrange typed: "it varies, I think. Some minority of really, really smart people."

According to Robert Scoble, a.k.a. The Scobelizer, a lot of the tech industry's leading people "pop in from time to time, particularly if there's a show that interests them on TWIT." Scoble was a regular 20 years ago when the chat room was born; Laporte was doing a show at the time called Laporte on Computers on talk radio station KGO in San Francisco. Scoble has since had stints at Microsoft, Fast Company, and Rackspace, and is now entrepreneur-in-residence at Upload VR, a company that promotes the virtual/augmented reality industry. He's enough of a tech insider that Laporte has him on This Week In Tech, TWIT's most popular podcast, but that's about the only time you'll find Scoble in the TWIT chat room these days.

"When I'm on the show I see lots of famous people hanging out [in the chat room] and participating," he said. But nobody, except Laporte, uses their real name. Regular listeners to the TWIT podcasts will hear frequent mentions of such chat room vets as Houdini7, ScooterX, Beatmaster, and OzNed.

Sometime the chat is over the heads of mere mortals. Case in point, this slightly condensed exchange:

[11:59] It'll be a mITX build again. I really like the form factor
[12:00] I'm sort of keen on putting it in a Fractal Design Node 304 case. It's been around for a while, but if you want a cube chassis it's among the best I think
[12:01] oh, let me look this one up then. It's an Antec AKS-150 or something like that
[12:01] I'll fiddle with servers, maybe PFSense to see how it is
[12:02] I have a MB in mind with 3 nics, 2 wired and 1 wifi
[12:02] I built mine in a corsair 250d
[12:02] Antec ISK 300-150, I have deployed many iTX builds in them. Just fine little builds
[12:03] I use the Node 304 for the home server.

That may make sense to Louis Maresca, a chat room regular who's worked as a lead developer and programmer at Microsoft. Maresca was tapped to co-host a TWIT podcast called Coding 101, produced in 2014 and 2015. He's not the only chat room denizen to make the transition to "on-air" talent.

TWIT Coding 101

Robert Ballecer, a Catholic priest with major IT cred, also emerged from the chat room. He grew up in the Bay Area, dumpster diving for parts at Silicon Valley tech companies so he could build his first computer. His trial-and-error approach to fabrication resulted in "a lot of blue smoke."

In the 1980s, Ballecer ran a bulletin board system "when 300 baud was crazy fast" and later became a fan of The Screen Savers, the cable television show Laporte hosted in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Father Ballecer became active in the TWIT chat room 10 years ago, at around the time Laporte started his first podcast. Ballecer's chatroom handle is PadreSJ; the SJ stands for the Society of Jesus, the Catholic Church's Jesuit order.

Robert Ballecer, TWIT

Ballecer lives at a Catholic high school in San Francisco, where he celebrates mass every day. But in addition to officiating at weddings and baptisms, Ballecer hosts TWIT's live events. He gets to travel around the US and abroad to cover such gatherings as CES, NAB, and Mobile World Congress. Laporte also hired him to host a podcast called This Week In Enterprise Tech, which is focused on software used by organizations and businesses.

Ballecer's personal work station includes a multi-monitor setup. One of his screens is used solely for monitoring the TWIT chat room. As far as Ballecer is concerned, one of the chat room's finest hours came in 2014 during the Mars landing. TWIT's live coverage of the historic event filled three full chat rooms with 3,000 people; an audience of 20,000 watched the network's live video stream.

"Everyone was excited and wanted to share what they were excited about," Ballecer recalled. "We had people talking about the first time they saw a space launch, where they were when The Challenger exploded, and the technology behind the landing. That's the essence of TWIT: a bunch of people who want to learn and want to teach at the same time."

TWIT Monitors

The TWIT chat room does have its down side. In recent years, trolls have been so unpleasant that Laporte considered ending chat. Many moderators quit.

"These trolls are really vicious, horrible people," Laporte told me.

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How horrible? Someone recently made fun of the fact that a chat room regular known as Tater passed away. Tater was a builder who lived in Alabama and was in his 50s when he died. In a private chat, a woman from Australia said, "I have never met him but we have been friends in this community for years. I'm terribly sad about his death."

The chat room, like the TWIT podcasts themselves, have a significant following among the blind and disabled. Laporte believes people who are housebound or agoraphobic find community there. And as annoying as the troll problem has been, Laporte is quick to acknowledge that TWIT chatters are ultimately a big plus. He mentions his Triangulation podcast in which the chat room supplies questions for guests.

"I've tried to do shows without the chat room and I'm so dependent on it now," said Laporte. "It's a really critical part of how I do what I do."

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