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?

Brief

A couple of weeks ago Tim gave me a project to write a piece about geek girls. This has rapidly turned into a marathon effort.
The general story is we are looking at the two apparent types of geek girls, those who use their gender of girlness to blog in the geek world, and those geeks who just happen to be girls.

We were initially just going to link to some sites of examples but now feel that we would get much more mileage from interviewing some geek girls. So far at least 5 have agreed and we are hoping for some more.

What we really wanted to get at is the heart of the blogger in question. Why do they blog the way they do, how do they see themselves in the world of geeks?

Tim asked in a poll - Do you Twitter? Some people asked "What is Twitter?" and this article should explain it for you.

First up, what does Twitter have to say about Twitter?
They say this: "What is Twitter? Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?"

Basically, Twitter is another way to stay connected online, but with some differences to your usual Instant Messenger.

Twitter is online based, but there are applications you can download in order to use it. The most popular client is Twhirl. Twhirl is a box on your desktop that you can chat in. You add people, and people add you. Anything you write in your Twhirl box, is visible to anyone you're connected to on it. It's a group connection. Same goes the other way, If you've added anyone, you see everything they write.

IM - Instant Messaging.

What is instant messaging?

While researching for my reviews, I came across this "What is instant messaging?" and it said this -

Instant messaging is the ability to exchange messages in real time with other people over the Internet. To send and receive instant messages, you need a connection to the Internet and instant messaging software.

The instant messaging software enables you to set up a list of contacts that also use the program. Once you set up this list, you can see who is online at a particular moment. If the person you want to talk to is online, you can begin a text, voice, or video conversation with them quickly and easily. If they are not online, you can still send a text message that they will receive when they login or leave them a voicemail.

I, personally, only use Windows Live Messenger. But I've been asked to write this article as a review of Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Skype. So I downloaded them all and signed up. All were easy enough to download I suppose, and it didn't take long at all. But when it came to signing up with Yahoo! Messenger, I had to be an American with an American zip code.. which I of course am not and do not have. Apparently you can go to their web site and sign up a different way, but I was told it's a dodgy way and so I decided not to bother with it. I do have a number of friends who I know use and enjoy Yahoo! Messenger, I don't know how much trouble they had getting an account but I guess the point is - It is do-able!

But for writing this review, in my opinion, downloading them and adding a contact to each of them, doesn't give me enough information about them to write a review. And seeming as well I've gotta write the review today, I don't have the time to use the other IM's over a period of time and get my own opinion on them all. So, I've Googled for other people's opinions and reviews.