New Voices: Leisa Reichelt

I am resurrecting a project that I started some time ago at Get Real to try to find new voices, based on a call from Halley Suitt. I am not going to be too much of a stickler about race, gender, and geography — Halley was trying to counter the American white male dominance of the blogosphere. I have no quarrel with that, but it’s not exactly what I am trying to do.

No, I am simply trying to uncover people who have been blogging for a short time, less than a year, to hear some new thoughts, experience new perspectives, and — honestly — just to smell that new mown hay.

Today’s choice revealed herself to me through the Oracle at Technorati: a link to the Conversational Index meme in a recent post exposed the Disambiguity blog of Leisa Reiche, who is an Australian woman, working in web design. Here’s one of her observations after blogging for a few months:

[from blogging milestones (2 months) at disambiguity]

Something I’ve noticed in my last two months of blogosphere immersion (and that includes a bit of mailing list immersion too) - there are some really mean people out there. Not many - nice people are definitely winning - but those nasty ones… eh. I’m still working out how to deal with them best. They’re not quite like trolls that you can just ignore…. but there’s no reasoning with them either….

At the end of the second month, the most exciting thing has been having a sense of engaging in a community - of getting to ‘meet’ people who thing about similar things to me, to swap notes on ideas and experiences, and just generally to be a part of the flow of ideas and conversations that is the energy of the blogosphere (sorry…. couldn’t think of a better word to describe it).

No apology is necessary, Leisa. Thank you for the unadorned and direct sense of excitement.