Amy Bellinger works as online content manager for the National Safety Council, and spends all the rest of her time online, too.
An early adopter of the online life, she haunted BBS forums in the late eighties. When the Web came on the scene, she lost her heart to it and never got it back. As a public relations practitioner for a big bank, a national PR firm and a city school district, Amy had written something every day for 17 years -- for her employers, but never in her own voice, so the Web as a vehicle for instant personal publishing was a revelation for the journalism grad.
Amy built her first web page in 1995 and by the following year had taught herself enough to erect and customize Perl/CGI message boards for a community of Jane Austen fans. The literature community she founded lives on 10 years later as The Republic of Pemberley. Almost as durable is PhinisheD, another online community founded by Amy and later handed off for others to manage. PhinisheD is a support group for stalled dissertation writers.
By this time she was through with PR. She spent three years as editor of a subscription newsletter for human resources professionals, then started working for a living online. Amy was webmaster for the Indiana University Alumni Association and manager of message boards and chat rooms for A&T Worldnet before joining the National Safety Council five years ago.
She blogs with the OPML editor as "Amyloo," and is an early adopter and unabashed fan of the OPML format and tools, despite a lot of rebellious initial misgivings about the implied rigidity of hierarchies.
Amy lives in suburban Chicago in a half-empty nest, and the 17-year- old will be going soon.
