TODAY: Farewell La Idler …thanks for sharing

I AM deeply sad­dened by the sud­den death last week of La Idler (idledays.net), one of my fel­low edi­tors at Tomorrow.sg. She suc­cumbed to the effects of a rare blood dis­or­der last Wednesday.

Read more at TODAY­on­line (pdf)

Tech­no­rati Tags: blog, Bloggers.SG, TODAY, tomorrow.sg

In the days that fol­lowed, I was moved by the out­pour­ing of trib­utes and kind words of sup­port from the local blog­ging com­mu­nity.
So much so that I now believe there is indeed a com­mu­nity amid this mot­ley assort­ment more known in the press for its trouble-causing
prowess than for any­thing useful.

So what if some news­pa­pers per­sist in labelling blog­gers as clue­less, care­less and more inter­ested in doc­u­ment­ing the con­tents of their lunch boxes?

I think there must be some­thing really impor­tant about the con­tents of our lunches if blog­gers such as yj (www.yewjin.com) could ded­i­cate his run at last Sunday’s marathon to Sondra.

I knew La Idler well from her blog — but I hardly spoke to Son­dra, her offline per­sona, even dur­ing edi­to­r­ial and organ­i­sa­tional meet­ings, many of which were held in prepa­ra­tion for the Blog­gers’ Con­ven­tion (bloggers.sg) ear­lier this year. It was just one of those things where you know some­one bet­ter online than you do off.

And there’s the rub — most of the blog­gers who left mes­sages of con­do­lences in the com­ments or wrote posts on their own blogs had never met Son­dra, but had grown to enjoy, iden­tify with, and appre­ci­ate the things she did for the local blo­gos­phere — both in her own writ­ings
and through her con­tri­bu­tions at Tomorrow.sg.

Blog­ger Chan­dler (samsies.com) typ­i­fied this sentiment.

“Though I do not claim to have known you as well as I could have … I find myself with plenty to tell you and thank you for as I bid farewell,” he wrote, remem­ber­ing how Son­dra had shared thoughts as diverse as blog­ging tech­ni­cal­i­ties to flavours of candy bars.

On the flip side, Sondra’s fam­ily appeared to be unaware of her online pres­ence and what an influ­en­tial per­son she had been in cyber­space. When my fel­low edi­tors and I attended her wake last week, we spoke briefly with her sis­ter, explain­ing who we were and how Son­dra was a part of our team.

Over the week, the edi­tors decided to do two things: Firstly, to com­pile Sondra’s blog into a book to present to her fam­ily and, sec­ondly, to raise some money to keep her blog, domain name and hosting.

As I wrote in a sort of online eulogy for Son­dra on Tomorrow.sg, per­haps this could be a way of remem­ber­ing some­one we didn’t com­pletely know — the archives, the cat­e­gories and each post, all have a way of assem­bling them­selves to form threads of under­stand­ing about a per­son we knew more as an online friend.

Or as Rogue Slayer (amicoolornot.blogspot.com) put it, in his trib­ute to Son­dra: “After fol­low­ing your blog for about a year now, you’ve parted from our lives in the most abrupt of ways. And yet, because of your blog, you’ll be for­ever immortalised.”

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over a year, and is, like other blog­gers, very thank­ful to have known Sondra/Idler/Fembot and what­ever iden­tity she went by online and off.