I was sad to discover today that Olive Riley, the woman thought to be the World’s Oldest Blogger, died last week, aged 108. Olive’s blog ‘The Life of Riley‘ chronicled her life growing up in the Outback, raising kids, and working as a bartender and farm cook in New South Wales, Australia.
Her friends Mike Rubbo and Eric Shackle, who helped her maintain the blog, have written touching tributes on both her site and the temporary World’s Oldest Blogger blog and its a testament to her popularity that her main blog is currently experiencing technical difficulties after having been overwhelmed by the outpouring of messages and tributes left by friends and readers.
Mike says in the most recent post:
Her example says; if a woman who left school in 1914, can embrace the internet in her 106th year, what is there you can’t do, friend?
…
If you look back through the thousands of comments we had, you’ll see that her power to inspire comes up again and again.
“Thanks so much Ollie, for inspiring my parents to get active, and overcome their fear of computers.” is a typical comment
Olive blogged for 15 months and is survived, and mourned, by “thousands of Internet friends and hundreds of descendants and other relatives” the blog, or blob as she often called it, was “mind-blowing to her,” her great grandson Darren Stone said.
“She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while. She enjoyed the notoriety – it kept her mind fresh.”
