Mark Twain
Ronni Bennett is the proprietor of Time Goes By, the highest-ranked elder blogging site on the Internet. The transplanted New Yorker lives in Lake Oswego, OR, where she produces her popular aging site.
“Blogging is a terrific medium for all kinds of reasons," says the prolific 72-year-old. She provides a six-point list to demonstrate why blogging is a perfect pastime for older people.
1. It helps overcome the unstructured and potentially isolated lifestyle of retired people.
2. When people leave the workplace they can be left without its daily camaraderie. Blogging can create a new circle of friends.
3. It can ease the aging process as family and friends move away or die.
4. It is a made-to-order home pastime when mobility issues set in. Email and Skype between older bloggers relieve isolation.
5. Blogging forces you to think.
6. It helps older people to focus. Political-minded writers will read the daily newspaper.
Bennett lived in New York City, making the rounds as a television network producer for 35 years with 20/20, The Barbara Walters Specials and other shows at NBC, PBS, CBS, and Lifetime. In 1995, she was hired on as the managing editor of CBSNews.com’s first website.
She was struck that she was the eldest person in the room by decades. “They were all 20-somethings and I was 55."
For nearly a decade she spent all her personal time researching aging, passionately reading books, magazines, scholarly articles and the news. Eventually, she needed a personal platform. A blog presented the opportunity to collect her material and go public.
Time Goes By was launched in 2003. The response was surprisingly positive. Since then, she has blogged every day. Her contributions range from hard-hitting news, to in-depth aging topics or humorous pieces. A community has built up as her blog has become popular.
Her blog roll is reserved for over 50-years-olds, a list to blog links that Bennett endorses. She links to 300 elder blog sites on Time Goes By and she alludes to thousands of bloggers from the 50 plus demographic who write on aging-related topics.
“I’m not tired of it. You never know everything there is to know about aging." Her posts go out every day to subscribers and are posted on Facebook and Twitter.
"I am not unique. If a topic interests me or affects me, I write about it," she says. "Thousands of others have asked the same questions, undergone the same life changes.”
Time goes by and Ronni Bennett is still running strong as the Internet's most prolific elder blogger.