To be absolutely transparent, Ada is someone I hadn’t heard of before I saw mention of the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge, which asks 1,000 people to post blogs on March 24 about women in technology whom they admire.

A few notable women that stand out. Marissa Mayer. My close friend Bean. Julia Roy. These women probably couldn’t be more different, but they’re women of my generation with whom I can relate.

I won’t be writing about them (others already have today, or will).

The women I want to write about and honor today are Mena Trott and my grandmother.

Mena Trott founded a company called Six Apart back in 2001 with her husband. Six Apart is home to Movable Type, a publishing platform, and TypePad, a blogging service now used all over the world by companies as well as individuals.

Mena started blogging several years before it was a mainstream activity and then created a platform to make this form of communication more accessible to everyone. Were it not for her, and counterparts at Blogger, LiveJournal and here on MySpace, I certainly wouldn’t have decided to air my business on the webernets.

I can’t say for sure that the world is better for my blogging. However, since I started my MySpace blog here in March 2006, I can say that you – my readers – have made the endeavor a worthwhile one. You’ve stood by me, engaged me and listened to the ramblings of a stranger.

We’ve talked about my scone experiments, travails with my hair, that time I went crazy and decided to move to New York City and, most fun of all, my barely believable childhood and schizophrenic roommates that enjoy vogueing.

We’ve been through a lot here on this blog. Mena made this experience you and I have shared something that’s replicated in a meaningful and traceable fashion all over the world.

I know this quick introduction to Mena may not be much in the way of tribute, but I wanted her to know her efforts don’t go unnoticed by the regular non-techie people around. She’s just barely a year older than me, and what’s she’s accomplished has inspired me a great deal.

I can’t call this a complete Ada Lovelace Day tribute without also including the woman who had the most influence on how I’ve turned out. That woman is my grandmother who, along with my grandfather, raised me for a number of years.

My grandparents started using email in 2000, and we used it to keep in touch while I was living abroad during grad school in 2001. Since then, they have gotten hip to digital cameras, photo sharing websites and other webernet nonsense. I’ve often gone to bed and woken up to an email my grandma sent at 11 the night before.

My favorite email to date is the last one I got. A little background: Facebook is a client of mine, and most people don’t know I have a Facebook profile because I’m not searchable and only add people I’m close to in real life.

Here’s the email:
From: _____@aol.com
To: Emily
Date: Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 11:56 PM
Subject: G&G

We have been thinking of you and praying for you each nite so you are in our
thoughts and prayers and we love you very much!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yes, I am on
FACEBOOK now …kids talked me into it! Whe says you cant teach an old dog
new tricks!!! Love you G & G

All the better to keep an eye on her. My grandma’s fondness for keeping on top of ways to keep in touch with her family using technology is, to me, the best example of what’s possible with social media. She makes me proud.

To her, to Mena and to Ada . . . thank you.

* You can find me elsewhere on the webernets at emily.storytlr.com

*NOTE: This blog, and all others timestamped before it, were originally posted on my MySpace blog.

I had also just started a new job. While I was dating my ex, I had distanced myself a little from my friends because they didn’t like him (and they’d also want me to tell you that they were freaked out about who I became while I was with him). But, with the breakup now made official by a football field’s worth of required distance at all times, I felt I could breathe again. Friends had been inviting me to join MySpace for months and on January 31, 2006, I finally did. (I might have avoided it a few months more had I not found the profile of my one of my best friends from high school. We lost touch in college, and I tried sending her a message but I couldn’t unless I signed up. Bean, for all that follows, I owe ya.)

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When I first signed up for this monster, I really only intended to use it to get back in touch with people I had lost, like Bean, and to stay in contact with my closest friends. I kept my friends list on lock the first couple of months, only adding people I knew in real life (with the exception of three people: Nina, Jerry and Sully, who have all become great friends). I think I topped out around 35 friends, and intended to stay there. I thought those people with hundreds of friends were either truly famous or just really needed attention.

One day in March, I was poking around, clicking on the different MySpace functions. I stumbled onto the “Top Blog” rankings, which is how I found Nina. Nina was so fucking funny that I immediately crafted a message to send along with my friend request – the first I had sent to someone I didn’t know. The message started off: “Bitch, I want to be your friend!” The rest, as they say, is A FUCKING INSANE STORY OF HOW MYSPACE SORT OF (TOTALLY) CHANGED MY FUCKING LIFE . . .

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The numbers, Jan. 31, 2007:

MySpace Friends: 419
Profile views: 23,609
Profile comments: 759

Blog Subscribers: 184
Blog posts: 85 (including this one)
Blog views: 25,539
Blog comments: 1,513
Total Blog Kudos: 919

I have always been a writer. I think a lot of people who find writing later in life have a hard time feeling that they “deserve” to call themselves writers, but I feel like I was born with the affliction. Being a friend, daughter or lover came second. That said, I never took blogging seriously. I mean, look at that word. It’s ugly. Who wants to be a “blogger?” Before I read Nina’s MySpace blog (which carried the tagline, “Blog it Out, Bitch!”), they were pointless emoticon-riddled ramblings someone once sent me a link to on LiveJournal.

No, thank you. If I wanted strangers to read my journals, I’d invite them over. I might be a writer, but I don’t like randoms probing my innermost thoughts. But damn, it was so fun to read about Nina’s most embarrassing moments. Her willingness to overshare reminded me of other internet-based writers I had enjoyed in the past, except she updated 5 or 6 times every single day. She was giving me a play-by-play analysis of what it meant to be a mother to an interracial child, a black woman married to a white man and a writer trying to find her way as a determined student. Maybe there was something to this vulnerability thing.

Then I wrote my first blog. It wasn’t anything but a little list of things that made me happy. I think I got 3 kudos and maybe five of my friends (including Nina) showed up to read it. I was playing at it . . . not really sharing anything deep or important. Then I realized that these other writers, the writers Nina first reminded me of . . . well, they had (or would soon have) MySpace profiles, too. I looked them up, added them and started corresponding with them.

Some of those people have became real life friends or mentors. It’s because of MySpace that I’ve met or talked to TheBunny, PhilaLawyer, Tucker Max, Neil Strauss and Robert Greene. It can be daunting to reach out to an author – or anyone you admire for that matter – but MySpace makes artists of all kinds so much more accessible. These people, in particular, have shown me what it means to really open up and let people see inside my life.

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By June, I was finally ready to be honest in my writing. It wasn’t like writing poetry, which I did all through high school, or like writing articles, which I had been paid to do since college. I was writing just for the love of it. I was saying whatever I wanted to say and letting go of it. “Heat and Porcelain,” was my first exercise in letting go. It was just like writing in my journal, but 1,000 times more intense because I knew that others would be reading it. Interpreting, misinterpreting, imagining. It was so kinky and inviting, this vulnerability.

From July until October, I wrote one story a month about my childhood. I was unprepared for the response and for how open people would be with me because they could relate. Honesty breeds readership.

In November, I overhauled my profile (with much help in the coding department) to shift more focus to my blog, and I began to hint at all the major changes I had planned for the upcoming year. Then I went on hiatus until the day I packed up the moving truck and drove myself into the madness that is New York.

It’s funny that this blogging thing is what helped me remember why I love writing so much. It’s great to write in my journal, and it’s gratifying to get paid to write for a circulation that’s equivalent to half the population of an entire (albeit small) state. But what I love most is making that connection with people by allowing them to latch onto my ugly bits and my demons.

I’ve used my blog to do several things:

Avoid therapy.

Identify goals and put together strategies to achieve them.

Share my passion for photography.

Pick your brains for book, movie and music recommendations.

And last, but certainly not least, blogging has allowed me to share my love of food and cooking.

It’s kinda funny. I know my stats aren’t anything to be impressed with, especially with bloggers like Nina who get upwards of 2,000 blog hits a day (or is it per post, Nina?). Hell, one of my best friends (actually, several of my closest friends) don’t even read my blog. It’s been a fun dalliance when I’ve had time . . . and when I’ve had focus, it’s been even more than that.

That you (and I’m including all readers here, not just subscribers) have found something to connect with, despite the fact that I post so infrequently, is something very significant to me. You’ve given me your time and your comments, and time and attention are really the most precious things we have to share.

I didn’t ever expect to be here a year later with over 400 friends (half of whom I’ve never met) and a bunch of people hanging out waiting for my next post. It’s really neat, and I thank you for that experience.

Rest assured that my writing life hasn’t fallen by the wayside. If anything, it’s intensified since I’ve gotten to NYC. I hope to share all of that good stuff with you in the coming months. In the meantime, browse around and see what I was babbling on about in those 85 blogs (all organized by category on my profile page). The earliest ones may not be good writing, but they are good for a laugh.

February will bring more rants and raves about life in New York, as well as a new Saucy Report, this time coming to you live from Brooklyn.

Had you told me a year ago that this silly little “social networking” idea would have brought so many amazing people into my life, or predicted that I would all of a sudden abandon everything in pursuit of a balls-out, penny-to-penny writing life, I never would have believed you. Thanks for a great year on MySpace.

If you don’t know her (and at least half of my subscriber list does), this is Nina.

Today is Nina’s birthday. I love her.

I joined MySpace at the end of January 2006 to stay in touch with old friends. I had never really considered blogging as an outlet for my personal writing (as opposed to the type I get paid to do). One day in February or March, out of curiousity, I clicked the “Blog” button at the top of the homepage and the list of top blogs popped up. Nina’s was on there and whatever her post was, I thought it was hilarious.

She started writing a few friends-only posts to avoid some drama, so she was the first non-real life friend I sent a request to. The title of the message I sent along with the friend request said, “Bitch, I want to be your friend!” Let’s just say she approved the request.

I had the good fortune of subscribing to her blog right before she and LilNavyWife collaborated on their now-famous blog about why they married white men. <-Click it. And that, my friends, was the beginning of blogging for me. I wrote my “Black Boys vs. White Boys,” blog and just kind of kept posting from there.

So, to wish my Neeners a happy birthday, a list of a few reasons why I love her.
1.The bitch will blog about anything. Eyebrow waxing, weaves, other people’s ugly children and . . . well, she even drunk-blogs. Because she’s so honest, she can get away with things like posting a drunk blog with only one word – “Dontcha.” That bitch got, like, 5 pages of comments on a one-word blog. I will never be that open with my life, so I’m glad she is so I can read all about it and nod my head in agreement.

2.When I was considering a few big changes to my life back in April, she was there to really encourage me to do what I want to do. I was also considering relocating, and Atlanta was on the short list of cities I was thinking about moving to. I’m not moving to Atlanta, but if I did, I know she and I would be getting into a lot of trouble. Donny (her husband) wouldn’t know what to do with us.

3.She is gorgeous. Look at her.

4.We are probably the whitest black girls you’ll ever meet. If you’ve talked to or met either one of us, you know what I’m talking about. Nina’s ghetto card got revoked, though, and I still have mine. Actually, if you read her next blog post, I have a feeling she’s earning her card back right this second.

5.She introduced me to Bill Dawes’ blog. Back in April, she wrote a blog entitled, “Who is Bill Dawes, and why do I want to have his babies?” She linked to his post that day – and it was one of the funniest, most honest stories I’ve ever read. I still think he should have kept “trash bag,” instead of “balloon,” but whatever. She consistently pimps other funny, honest or artistic bloggers and I love her for that.

6.Nina is just an awesome person. I’m glad everything in her personal life has worked out the way it has, and I’m sure from here it will only get better. She has an amazing husband who supports her in everything she does (even if what she’s doing is eating a banana split in the middle of the night while waxing her eyebrows, relaxing her hair, trying Nair for the first time and watching all 13 hours of TV on her four Tivos – and then blogging about it). She has a beautiful child who is already smart as a whip. She is also sexy as hell, and doesn’t much care if bitches hate her for it.

I love you girl!

If you know Nina, feel free to leave her some good tidings here. If you don’t know her, check that bitch out. Happy Birthday, Neeners.