An online friend has set up a blog to ask people how they connect online. Andrea & I have known D’Arcy quite a while. He works with WordPress/WordPress MU at the University of Calgary. We’ve never met him IRL, so he qualifies as someone who we have connected with. So, the first way I connect with people is through working with and contributing to Open Source projects. The project I spend the most time on is WordPress MU.

Andrea & I have been accessing the Internet since the early 90′s. Over the years, we have used a wide variety of methods to connect to people. I remember doing things like connecting to a computer at a client’s site via the Internet with remote control software, firing up a text editor and using the text editor as a chat window.

Generally though, the way I’ve connected online with people over the last few years has been through writing in this blog, commenting in other blogs & posting in forums. Recently I’ve joined both facebook and twitter. For the most part, facebook provides an online connect to people that I know from somewhere else. I haven’t particularly seen it as a means to make new connections. On the other hand, I think that’s one of the main benefits of twitter.

One of the things that I don’t do is video & audio connecting. That’s because our Internet connection is via satellite and the latency is worse than dialup.

Anyway, thanks D’Arcy for giving me something to write about.