Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This week we are featuring for the first time a profile of one of our Geek Girl Bloggers.

Geek Girl Profile -

Name: Allison Reynolds
Screen Name/s: Allison - AllisonR - Gramyre
Personal blog/s: http://allisonreynolds.com/blog/ and  http://www.netxperiment.com/wordpress
Social Networks: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Seesmic, Flickr, UStream, friendfeed.
Other websites she is active in at times: deviantART, JustinTV.
Current Employment: A manager for a large multinational IT company.
Location: Australia

What is your motivation for blogging?

"I blog for several reasons - To make my online and offline projects public so I am accountable for their results, people seem to love watching other people "do" things. I blog because I have Multiple Sclerosis and writing keeps the neural pathways developing (use it or lose it!). And I blog because I like expressing myself in the medium, kind of like modern story telling, but making the truth sound interesting so that the people who read my blog get something out of it."

What is it that you find yourself blogging about, mostly the same things or does it vary?

"I mostly blog about the actions I have taken, or will take in my projects. The triumphs, the dismal learning experiences :)

I intersperse that with things I find interesting, and my thoughts and feelings and personal stuff, which is filed in a section called Me-anderings."

What style of blogging do you do, short and regular, or not so regular but long, other? And is your blogging just text, or do you also use audio or video?

"I class my blogging as short and regular, I don't want the audience to be bored or confronted by a wall of text. My current blog is fairly new and I have a video section that I have been popping up my YouTube videos in, though the plan is to get a little more organised and use UStream.com to put on a bit of a regular show (starting in June) discussing projects, motivation and things like that.

I have created podcasts in the past, but am more interested at the moment in hooking up to a weekly broadcast via streaming video with interactive chat. I will probably test that out with a specific audience such as the people with MS who read my other blog.

In older blogs I did blog-casting, but technology has moved on and iPods have screens now so the natural move is to video with sound rather than just sound."

How Allison became a Geek Girl Blogger:

"Being in my early 40's I have a 20+ year history in the IT industry, in wide and varied roles. Combine this with my love of writing and I think it was probably inevitable I ended up a blogger.

These days I see blogging as the communication I would like to leave behind, unlike the ephemera of a Twitter tweet. Both have their place, but in the scheme of things, my blogging ranks higher in quality score than other things I say online.

Let me fill you in on some of my geek time line. Back in the prehistory of the PC I was given a newly released Tandy TRS-80 by my parents. This amazing thing captured my imagination immediately and I spent hours copying and creating BASIC code. Alas my parents were not rich people and the tape drive memory did not come with the machine, so each power down meant hundreds of lines of code had to be typed in all over again. I attribute my dislike of coding to this day, on my first foray into the world of apps.

After I left high school, the world was changing from typewriters and calculating machines, to mainframes and PCs. My first full time job was with a credit union working as a data entry clerk. Being young (18) and enthusiastic, when the call went out for someone to learn troubleshooting skills for their WAN links and multiplexers I was chosen.

I wasn't there long when I was poached by a newsagency co-operative to come work for them and combine my computer operating experience with my artistic flair (I used to draw silly cartoons in the office) and used one of the first digitising cameras in Australia to create Videotex pages. Using the office machines I became an avid user of Viatel ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nDITCEB0dc ) which included bulletin boards and other ways of communicating with others via computer. I have not stopped communicating via PC in the 20 years since.

So saying all of that, my career moved to TDM and IP voice technology and finally into IT management. I have recently been outsourced as part of IBM's Network Services to AT&T, moving from a Network Implementation Manager role to Data Operations Manager.

So there is a very dry potted history of my career, but my true love is the Internet (and always has been). I adore the freedom and break neck speed at which it is still developing. I cherish the opportunity to stuff my brain full of information, and to talk to incredibly bright and interesting people without the normal social barriers."

Stay tuned for our next Geek Girl Blogger profile - next week.

aManda