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This week’s GGB Sarah Blow is from the UK and is the actual founder of Girl Geek Dinners! Be sure to watch Sarah’s video on how to start a Girl Geek Dinner.

Name: Sarah Blow
Screen Names: Sarah Blow or GirlyGeekdom
Personal Blogs:
http://sarahblow.com
http://girlygeekdom.blogspot.com
http://girlgeekdinners.com 
http://londongirlgeekdinners.co.uk/
Social Networks: LinkedIn, Facebook (private), Twitter, Viddler. Current Employment:
Software Engineer & Founder of Girl Geek Dinners
Location/country: UK

What is your reason/motivation for blogging?

I have a number of very different blogs and each have different reasons for their existence.  My primary blog is my personal one, which is where I put up things that I find interesting and fun that I want to share with people.  Then I have the GirlyGeekdom blog which is a group one.  This is focused on all things girly and geeky.  The others are directly related to the Girl Geek Dinners and are the simplest and most efficient way to manage and distribute information to the Girl Geek networks.

Overall my reasons for blogging are to distribute information and knowledge, to share experience and to influence change.

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

Most of the time these days I find that I blog about gadgets, a particular technology, women and the IT industry, rock climbing and topical things that have sparked my interest.  It does vary dependent on what free time I have and what is going on around me.

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?

My style of blogging is a mixture.  I’ll get into a rhythm and do a series of blog posts and they will tend to be short to midsized and regular.  However if I’ve been extremely busy I do find that there can be a long gap and then I’ll suddenly do a flurry of posts.  I do however spread them out and post date them if this is the case  to try to keep some regularity for my readers.

How Sarah became a Geek Girl Blogger:

My first ever blog is still in existence however it is in a permanent state of silence.  It is or was based around .net compact framework and various tips and tricks around the .net technologies.  The cause of the blog being created was a friend suggesting I started one and I decided to give it a go... I think it started around 2004 or so.  When I first started out I had no idea what I was going to put on it but I then realised that I could use blogs as a form of online notebook.  From there I learnt more about how blogs can be used as a tool for engagement and once I figured this out I pretty much outgrew the capabilities of the site and wanted to be able to do my own site designs and not be constrained by the system that I was using there. 

Then came the GirlyGeekdom blog over on blogger which was a bit less constrained but without the need to know anything complicated and web related.  My background was and pretty much still is .net technology and related mobile and systems design.  When I created the GirlyGeekdom blog I started writing there on my own but over the course of 12 months I realised that others who read the blog had a lot more to contribute than they put in their comments so I opened it up to co-authors.  As a result it has flourished. 

With having opened that blog up and with it being very much specialized around women and technology I felt that I needed to have an alternative opening for those posts that just didn’t fit in women & technology and that were more general and random.  The result was my personal blog. 

My choice for the Girl Geek Dinners sites was to have them blog based as it allowed for flexibility and the timely showing of information.  It also had the rss feeds built in and the ability to add widgets which lends to a simple but effective website and information store.  I use Viddler there quite a lot to show past event video’s, embed our newsletters in pdf format and have our events calendar there with our upcoming events in it.  There are more plans for the site but they will take time to integrate with the rest of the site.  So I guess watch this space.

Thanks for reading our latest GGB survey…

If you are a Geek Girl Blogger, or know that you probably are one even if you don’t consider yourself to be one, and you’d like to be featured in our series, then please contact us and we’ll get back to you. We’re always on the lookout for some new GGB’s so don’t hesitate if you’re interested. We’d love to feature you!

aManda