Every day that she goes into the office, Helen Thompson pops an audiobook in the car stereo and throws four gallons of gas away to venture out of the safety and beauty of the Northern Shenandoah Valley and into the sprawl and suck of Northern Virginia, where she is a communications professional involved in association publications and web content management since 2005. Prior to that, she was an editor for a major university’s administrative newspaper and helped shuffle its website into the 21st century. As early as 2001, she identified that syndication technology would be useful for both student and alumni relations, especially if it allowed content to be imported into portal platforms such as Blackboard, which was taking off at that time.
A compulsive writer, she was drawn originally to livejournal before venturing into the wider blog world, becoming familiar with platforms including wordpress and moveable type; an innate knack for organizing information (which she has never been able to translate into organizing the clutter that follows her everywhere) translated into an affinity for meta tagging and interlinking information. Prior to the advent of web 2.0 technology, she was working on what she called a four-dimensional story using hyperlinks to provide backstory and parallel points of view in pieces of short fiction she published at the online community SFF.net.
She’s now fascinated with the idea of growing communities through web 2.0 technologies, having evolved through newsgroups and listservs to FOAF and XML aggregation to platforms like Second Life, Facebook and MySpace.
Professionally, she recently oversaw the redeployment of an association publication website that resulted in a tremendous increase in traffic for the site. She was recognized for her work with an APEX Grand Award for for-profit publication websites. She has also been recognized by the Society for National Association Publications for her writing.
In September, her professional and vocational interests were merged when she accepted a social media position with another association.
She has volunteered her time and editorial writing talents for several collaborative blogs and is a former entertainment journalist for a major urban alternative weekly. Now she wrestles with how to manage her own personal brand when she dabbles in so many distinct blogospheres.
Email Helen at exurbanista@gmail.com.
