A wonderful way of connecting is through blogs and blogging. Weblogs or personal journals are cyber records a number of people keep on varying subjects. Ponding included. Popular hosts for such writing include LiveJournal and Blogspot. In addition to the individual blogs, there are often times communities set up for further interaction. While flaming and other destructive behavior happens everywhere on the net, unfortunately, places like LiveJournal communities seem a bit calmer and low key. In order to join, you need to have your own LiveJournal account and journal. These are free and you no longer need an invitation code from another member (think gmail). LiveJournal communities to check out include:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/aqu... : This LJ community is geared towards fish keeping be it in pond or aquarium form. Seem rather active with lots of questions of animal health.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/fis... : This LJ isn't as active as the one above but people have asked some good questions and you can read the replies of other ponders.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/fis... : In this LJ community people share pictures of their fish... not an easy task!
Another nice aspect is you can visit members of any given LJ community and see if they have a pond related journal / blog. These often can provide links you may not find on big search engines. This phenomenon holds true for many types of blogs, including those hosted with blogspot.
A downside to blogs in particular is a number of studies have found them to be inconsistent. While many start out with numerous entries, after a while a number will stop being updated for seemingly no reason at all. The same can happen for various lists and groups. From my observations many messageboards on water gardening have become very lackluster. The exception would be that of KingSnake. Perhaps this is due to people spending more time a blogs? Or it can be due to the rise of flaming, Trojans (spywear) and spam attacks on users posted e-mail addresses. If you see any evidence of abandonment or excessive spam of an unrelated nature, it may be time to move on to greener pastors.
Another problem often times is flaming and abusive users who join only to create trouble. In one case I left a Yahoo! group because of all of the childish fighting that was taking place. Many of the other members were leaving as well and demanding the mass e-mail
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