On Friday night at the Tweet-up, Laura and I were chatting to Louisa about meeting bloggers and how actually meeting people face-to-face makes such a difference in the way you read their blogs.

It’s always funny meeting people from your online world for the first time.  No matter how many photos they post of themselves, you always have a preconceived idea about what they look like and sound like.  I’m not scared of meeting online people anymore… like I was years ago.  All the BN meetings (a local baby forum) over the last 5 years have cured me of that for good!  But as Laura and I were both saying, for some reason, meeting bloggers feels slightly different.

Bloggers tend to put more of themselves into their blog posts than forum participants do.

You know when you meet a group of people for a braai or a lunch, the first half hour or so is spent catching up on latest developments in each other’s lives.  With bloggers that almost never happens… all the news is on their blogs.  There’s no need to rehash it, and in fact, re-hashing is such a schlepp for me now.  If you want to know what I’ve been doing, read my blog damnit!  Why do I have to tell you too?!

Anyhoo, back to my point… after meeting Louisa for the first time a few weeks ago and listening to the way she speaks and watching her facial expressions, I have become an avid follower of her blog.   I find it hillarious now, because as I’m reading I imagine her dry sense of humour, the lilt in her voice and her laugh as she’s writing her posts.

And on the subject of writing in your own space… I’ve been trying to get one of my colleagues to blog for months.  I know she reads Janet’s  and my blogs, but she never comments, yet she talks to us about what she’s read on them.  Well, I’m pleased to say that she’s started one finally!

Then today she floored me!  I asked her if she’d written a post yet and I helped her with hyperlinking.  She commented about how easy it seemed to be and then proceeded to tell me that she’d got told by someone that they didn’t think she should blog because she wasn’t technical enough!!

I hate that!  Blogging isn’t about technical stuff. It’s so easy to do.  You don’t have to be a wizz-kid to get it right… all you need is something to say!  It still makes me cross thinking about what she’d been told. And it makes me determined to help her in any way that I possibly can   LOL!  And anyway, she’s proven more than once in the last few months that she can be as technical (if not more) as the rest of the IT team!  But that’s besides the point… I’m sure she’ll love this world of blogging and find her spot to ramble on and vent and then maybe finally I’ll see some pics of her kids