Whether you call it décor or defacement, we seem to share a need to make personal statements on flat surfaces. From subway wall graffiti and school locker decoupage to leg cast signatures and bumper sticker testimony, we find creative ways to express our quirks, paradigms, loyalties and political leanings. The latest frontier? Laptops. Seems the real nerds these days are those caught with naked laptops, devoid of stickers from the hip Web 2.0 likes of Technorati, Flickr, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, Ubuntu, WordPress, and Upcoming.org. Industry conferences become hunting expeditions for more laptop plunder. Walk around Yahoo!'s cafeteria, coffeebars and conference rooms and you'll see all the cool kids have them.

But the truly devoted go to extreme lengths to pimp their laptops. I ran into Social Signal blogstress Alexandra Samuel at the recent Blog Business Summit and was quite taken with her MacBook embellishment — a translucent del.icio.us tag cloud sticker that covered her entire laptop lid. Her passion for "mac," "rss," "vancouver," and "recipes" is now unmistakable. The process involved her de.licio.us account, an oversized external monitor, Photoshop and a site called Pimp My Laptop. If you want to promote your own del.icio.us tags (or any other obsession), read more about how she did it here. Then check out this Flickr cluster for more pimped laptops — and add your own photo.

A note of caution: If you're new to laptop schwag, don't be like me. Proper etiquette is to position your stickers so they're right-side-up to those facing your open laptop. In my haste to be cool, I'm tragically upside-down. Dork.