Recently, I had a brief encounter with American Idol Season 7 winner and now certified Platinum recording artist, David Cook. I was able to get a picture with him and upload it to Facebook instantly…making many of my friends jealous. With social networking web sites like Facebook, you can share snippets of your life almost instantly.

I love it! Eight years ago, when I met another recording artist by the name of Melissa Etheridge for the first time, there was no Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter to share these exciting chance meetings. In fact, that was before I had a camera phone, I had to buy a disposable camera from the gift shop to mark the occasion. Social networking media is all the rage, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon!

I have family and friends spread all over the country and living abroad, and networking media has been great in keeping me up to speed on the happenings of their lives--sharing snippets, pictures and videos.  It’s exciting to be seeing things in their lives that you might otherwise have missed…and in a way living vicariously through others, seeing pictures from their beach vacation, to "little Johnny’s" 3rd birthday.

The power of these social networking sites never ceases to amaze me. I am also an avid genealogist, and one of my hobbies is tracing my family tree back many generations…and forward to current generations of different branches of my family tree. I have found many distant cousins, and I was recently contacted by my half-8th Cousin once-removed via Facebook, connecting me to him and his life. Earlier today, I was browsing through this cousin’s recent pictures of a NASCAR event, in which he stood with the pit crew of Jimmie Johnson and Carl Edwards, met Robby Gordon and recording artist, Kid Rock. I found that really kinda cool…

It’s also great to find companies on these social networking sites. Southwest has a solid fan base on Facebook of 68,741 (as of 6/15/09) and counting strong! While I’m not in charge of the Southwest pages on Facebook or Twitter, they post great updates about what’s happening in the system and keeping Customers and Employees updated.

Now, what I’m gonna do, more like what I can’t wait to do, is update my status with the link to here, to let my friends and family know that I just blogged about writing for “Nuts About Southwest”!!