Networking and staying in touch is important, and blogs and group sites like Facebook and LinkedIn provide a chance for the shyest and most retiring among us to stand up and have our say.

I’m not the only person to walk into a roomful of strangers and be struck dumb with terror. I know it makes no sense, but it’s hard wired into me. So I force myself to blog, and Twitter, and post.

Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I feel I’m talking to a roomful of strangers. Hostile ones, at that. Or even worse, an empty room.

You can’t go everywhere, unless others circulate what you say (please!) So these are the rooms I’m often going into, and where you can always find me.

THE FOTOLIBRA BLOG: http://blog.fotoLibra.com
This is where I and other fotoLibra folk can chew the fat about picture libraries, images rights, sales, new formats for rights sales such as e-books, Picture Calls, cameras, markets, trends, publishing, photographs — anything to do with the business of visual content provision, which incidentally is the long name of fotoLibra’s holding company, VisConPro.

THE FOTOLIBRARIAN BLOG: http://fotolibrarian.fotolibra.com
More domestic and personal. Dogs, cats, tortoises, rugby, cricket, F1, food, follies, fonts, guitars, walks, cars, cigars, scotches, watches, beer, wine, women, song — the little things that keep me interested and alive. In case anyone didn’t know that ATB before my signature in my emails stood for All The Best, I’m thinking of changing it to IDH — In Deteriorating Health.

LINKEDIN: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gwynheadley
Professional business networking site. If you know me through work or want to do business with fotoLibra, this is my site of choice. I haven’t used it that often, but recently I’ve been attracted by the Ebooks, Digital Books and Digital Content Publishing Network group. When I have time to explore it, I’ll find or found a Picture Library group.

FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com
Yeah, I know. Young women and girls. But they’re my nieces, he protested! This is how I keep in touch with a surprising number of my family and old friends. Grand-nieces are included too, as well as nephews. Not generally a place where I post stuff of interest to fotoLibra. My Facebook name is, surprisingly, Gwyn Headley.

TWITTER: http://twitter.com/home
It gets worse. Yes, I twitter. There, I’ve said it. In 140 characters or less. It’s a way of pointing people to blogs. I hope. I’d love to know how it raised $35 million without a business plan. I twitter on pro and personal subjects, often directing fellow twitterers to a particularly apposite blog. My Twitter name is fotoLibrarian.

Five of these networking tools may be plenty for most, but there is room for a sixth, and it’s going to be on fotoLibra. You can read about it here. It’s a while away yet, but it’s going to be a great tool for photographers and picture researchers alike.

Finally, before we had all this internetworking wizardry, people simply met each other in crowded smokey rooms. And Publisher’s Lunch quoted me as saying “Networking is the opportunity to be ignored by people who’ve known each other all their lives.”