New

I had a good day today. Probably an over run from last night.

Last night was the historic maiden Kuching Bloggers Meet !! I thought it was a great success. We all got to meet everyone and what an interesting bunch of people we had. I'm especially pleased. I really hope we can meet regularly and even more I hope that we can form more concrete relations with each other besides just being blogger colleagues.

Meeting one new person is such a great experience. The discovery and the introductions. Learning their interests & dislikes, quirks & idiosyncrasies. I love it. Meeting new people always brings excitement. Now multiply that by TEN. I'm going to have this good vibe for a while.

Another thing that struck me was when I was reading Lisa's post about chatting. How true is that. I posted about the same thing a while back and last night's meeting sort of confirmed an opinion that I've been having about online communities.

The chatting scene has degenerated a lot since the heady days of the mid 90s, when mIRC ruled. Nowadays, it's just a whole bunch of repressed, desperate men, asking whether you want to cyber or not (regardless of the gender my nick implies). Or some teenage kid trying to hook up with some chick. It's actually hard to get a decent chat on IRC nowadays (I tried). And if you use a feminine nick, it's nearly impossible to come away without being sexually harassed (I tried this experiment too, and the result is consistent everytime).

Whatever happened to making friends through chatting ? Or the comfort of having a deep conversation with total stranger where you can talk about your most intimate fears and greatest desires without it degenerating into an offer for cyber (and sometimes actual,scarily enough) sex.

There's a lot that can be said about chatting. Lots of related topics like the shell some people put when they're online and other philosopical stuff like that.

What I am going to write about today is my opinion that the blog scene (at least the Kuching one) won't degenerate that way. There's not much danger of the blog scene being invaded by sexually repressed men (or women) blogging solely for the purpose of soliciting sex.

I posted about this on the AfterOphelia Communal Blog in April I think (and Amy quoted me in one of her own post !). Bloggers are different from chatters and others. Blogging takes effort and discipline. Blogging takes passion (just look at how elaborate some blogs are. Not mine though, I'm just too lazy heh.!) Many weblogs contain sensitive, personal accounts, therefore I can safely say that the average blogger is honest. The average blogger doesn't hide and pretend to be another person. And that last part is probably the best part.

During these days of lies,fakery and deception it's good to know that honesty still exists online. That's proof that despite of what we read and hear on the news, there are still many good, honest people in this world.

And that's a good thing.
-------------------------------------------------------