I’ve been out and about at a few Christmas related shindigs of late (which partially explains the mini slow down in proceedings here…), and even though the crowds I’ve been mingling with haven’t been especially geeky or hi-tech, if some of the topics of conversation aren’t related directly to social networks and blogging, they are certainly influenced by them.

One girl told me about an upcoming party she was planning for all the friends she had met “randomly”. She qualified randomly something like this:

You know when you add a Facebook friend, and you have the option to say how you met, or know, that person, and you can say “they met randomly”. This party is for the all people I’ve met randomly!

And of course the topic of blogging hasn’t been too far from people’s lips either. If you’re like me and still spend at least an hour or two a month tweaking your stylesheets or markup, realising the degree to which blogging tools like Wordpress, and Blogger, are now taken for granted can be a shock to the system.

After explaining to one blogger that I have three websites/blogs, I was asked what themes (or pre-made/designed layouts) I use for them. “I do it myself I told him, you use a text editor like NotePad, and away you go”. I clearly didn’t make much headway though, as the response was:

What do you mean you don’t use a theme? How can that be?

Just was well then I didn’t tell him one of those sites has no backend, and is 100 per cent hand coded!