A blog post was already brewing following our DM conversation a few weeks ago. Let me say that I had my first meeting experience like this in the mid 1990s from a colleague I only knew through a listserv, and visited him in Oregon.

It’s been my hobby, or passion since then, to meet people I’ve known first through these tubes. Not just meet, but visit in their homes. I traveled for 6 months in 2011, 15,000 miles around the US and Canada doing this, and have stayed with my “imaginary” friends on travels to New Zealand, Australia, the UK.

It’s more real than real.