OK, here I am blogging on Blogger after an invitation I received from my good old friend Constantinos - the owner of this blog. OK, I'll be honest with you. When I received this invitation asking me to be his guest author, I emailed Constantinos and said I couldn't accept it despite the fact that he has been my guest author on my
Cypria blog on
Typepad for almost 4 years! And I must admit that thanks to Constantinos and his wonderful postings on Greece and the Greek islands, my Cypria blog on Typepad was upgraded! Constantinos has almost tripled the number of visitors to my Cypria page.
This said I honestly do not rely on numbers or ...ok ...let me rephrase this. I do rely on numbers as far as visitors are concerned. As Jean-Paul Sartre said : "I write to be read" - J'écris pour être lu - And I wouldn't be blogging on 4 ...now 5 different blogs just for me! But!!! When Constantinos's invitation came, I had to have second thoughts. Not because I don't trust Constantinos - I do trust him wholeheartedly - but because I think that not many people will like me! I am avery straightforward and outspoken person, often very blunt, and I won't pretend! Well, I think Constantinos knows that!
I promise I'll post something more interesting next time. At the moment , I would like to thank Constantinos from the bottom of my heart for trusting me to be his guest author. It's a great honour for me. And I do hope I won't mess things up! But before I go...just one question and please be honest! To what extent do you trust online friends? Would you trust anonymous people?
Oh my! Where do I go from here? Ah right ...publish post I guess. I will..but ...Constantine mou, if no one comments on your brand new blog ....please don't blame me ! Filakia
FROM ANASTASIA -
GUEST AUTHOR
15 comments:
Hi Anastasia and welcome to Blogger. Thank you very much for accepting my invitation to contribute to my blog. It is, indeed, a great honour for me as I have always admired your writing and your blogs as well as your outspoken character. I am also very glad to hear that your Cypria blog on Typepad is doing well. I only wish I had more free time to post there more often. Concerning your question, I believe in online friendship and I trust my online friends even if they post anonymously. I respect some people's right to keep their anonymity on the Net. Have a wonderful week ahead and thank you again for your contribution.
What a lovely surprise to see you here, Anastasia. I think Constantinos is very lucky to have you as a guest author. No, I don't trust online friends very easily. That's why I've set my blog to Friends and I have added only a few people. Although I don't really mind people blogging anonymously, I'd never trust an empty profile. Take care and have a lovely week.
I have many online friends especially on the chat or by email but I trust only 5 or 6 of them. I also talk anonymously and dont use a photo except to the ones I can really trust and who have became very good friends.
For me it is very difficult to trust online friends. They come and go. In blogging it is all depending on how many comments you give them or how many comments they give you and this is childish in my opinion. I have recently signed up to livejournal and I have 0 friends and maybe this is much better.
And yes! Something else. Online friends will never care for you. They just send their...prayers but they only care about themselves and their families. Well...I don't believe in online friendship. But I accept that there are exceptions. I am just talking from my own experience.
It depends on the person, Anastasia. I can trust online friends when they are honest with me and this is not hard to understand. And , of course I am honest with them. But like Laura, I would never trust an empty profile or a completely anonymous blogger. I couldn't call these people friends. Just like in real life we don't trust everyone, it is the same in online communication as well. By the way, I think Constantinos had a great idea to invite you as a blog author. In this way, blogging and communication in general become more varied and more interesting.
Online friends can teach us great ideas and help improve blogging, exchange views and draw attention to important actions. It's a kind of friendship different from all other friendships.
Ahh...another blog to read! :-) Good to find you here, as well(and Constantinos, whom I know of from comments at your Typepad blog and from back in the Yahoo 360 days)
Yes, on line friends come and go, but that happens in off line life as well. I seem to have been lucky in connecting with some good, honest souls, so for the most part my experience has been good blogging and networking.
Tina, what a lovely surprise to see you here! Well.. you know, it's not easy to be a guest author but on the other hand I do enjoy this interaction between bloggers coming from different forums. I was glad to see that Blogger supports that. Unfortunately, as you may remember from the Yahoo!360 days, I was harassed online for quite some time. And that was when I had second thoughts on online frendship. But that was only for a while. I've made wonderful friends online - people I used to chat with 5 years ago still visit my Typepad blog today. And we're great friends. I believe in online friendship and I feel blessed to have so many great online friends.
since 2004 that i am online i have made great friends that i love very much and care for them a lot. i never had an unpleasant experience so i suppose i am very lucky to meet some great people online
Online friends are different than friends you have known in person for a while. With the latter it is easier to find out who they really are. I use the 6 months rule, because in that amount of time, most have dropped their guard once of twice. With online friends it is much easier to pretend, fake, or anonymous, even when you have a profile pic up. Anoymous writers: it depends on the reason - if they have been burnt before, or if a violent ex-friend/hubby/lover is searching for them, i can understand.
You pose interesting questions!
i just want you both know that having you as my online friends here is a privilege i will always treasure, albeit from afar. when i started blogging years ago, i only had the intention to write for myself, pour out the thoughts thats bottled up inside me. until one day, someone told me to share. never have i expected to have met really nice friends here. exchanging ideas and thoughts and opinions is a great thing, especially because i learn alot from it. yes, there's alot of fake people out there, wearing the cloak of anonymity, but u can easily tell who are true and who are not. im glad we have a choice to set our pages private and share it to our friends only. i only have very very few online friends and even if we only meet in this two dimentional realm, i care for my true friends here as i care for my true friends who i get to see everyday in my daily life. and i thank u both, mr constantinos and ms anastasia, for giving the chance to be part of your blogs. your friendship is a blessing. love yah both :)
summer
* Laura, I don't easily trust empty profiles unless they are people I know.
* Olga, I don't blame you taking some precautions online and I do feel really lucky to have met you on the chat.
* Christina,I often visit your page on livejournal but unfortunately my Blogger open ID isn't accepted. I left you a comment as anonymous. Talking of comments, I think they are very important when you blog. I am always very interested in my friends' feedback - this can be very constructive. I understand that you had a bad online experience but, believe me, there are some wonderful people out there who really care for their online friends.
* I agree with you Stefania and it's not really hard to realise if someone is honest or not. While protecting myself online, I behave exactly as I do in real life.
* Reader Wil, you are right. I also feel that online friends can offer a different kind of friendship and their feedback can help us improve in so many ways.
* Tina, sometimes online friends can prove to be much more honest than some offline friends. First of all because they have nothing to gain such as personal interest for instance.
* Anastasia, harassment and bad experiences can very often occur offline as well considering how many "fakes" and hypocrits there are in society who would only be your friends out of personal interest. True friends are hard to find - whether online or not- that's why I also feel blessed to have made a few great online friends.
* Sophia, I happened to have some nasty online experiences but I did not let them spoil the enjoyment of true online friendship and honest communication.
* Jeannette, it's true that it's harder to tell whether an online friend is honest or not than it is in real life situations. It is often said that the eyes are the mirror of our soul, and its definitely easier to realise if someone is honest or not when you look that person in the eye - something which does not always happen in online communication.
* Summer, thank you for your kind words, I also value your friendship even though I haven't known you for long. With people like you, yes, I guess it's easy to know if they are honest or not. Anonimity should not prevent us from being ourselves online and behaving like we do in real life.
I'm another fan of Constantino's as well as Anastasia, so being here feels like old home week. I had a Blogger account, I just never used it, but now that my first love blogging site is experiencing technical problems (for the past two years?) I made the move to a blogging only forum, as Anastasia quoted because I "write to be read". Filakia
I'm glad to see you here, Lizzie. Well, I'm only a guest author or a contributer, and I'm not sure if I have the right to respond to comments or not. I must ask the blog owner! Since he has trusted me with his username and password in order to respond to comments on his behalf, I guess I can do that! On Typepad guest authors are treated differently - there are many restrictions even on the Pro - that's why I hesitate a bit.But thanks for visiting!
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