I’ve never really been one to participate in online community building. Other than exchanging emails with friends and lurking on a few mailing lists, I’ve never really made the effort to meet and get to know people through the Internet.

I haven’t, that is, until I began to blog. Reading other people’s weblogs, I feel like I’ve met all these neat, fascinating people. When they all went to SXSW, I feel like I went along too on a virtual vacation (thanks to the seemingly endless supply for digital camera photos).

But people are getting to know me also. All of a sudden I’ve been participating in #BlogIRC, and I exchange emails with other bloggers, and I joined AOL Instant Messenger tonight (hit or miss 74). In fact, I had just put that up in the column to the right when one of my regular readers who I had never corresponded with before IM’ed me and we had a nice chat.

Now that I’m going to be moving to a fairly remote town (details about the end of my job hunt are coming soon, I promise!), I think I may be using the Internet more and more to meet people.