Join the Diabetic Online Community

We're fortunate, these days, to have many options to connect online with other diabetics.  These connections provide information, strength, and an important way to alleviate the aloneness many diabetics feel.  Whether you'd like to join in the discussion or just see what others have to say, there are some great tools available to you.

Here are some of the ways you can connect online with other diabetics:

Online Diabetes Communities

There are a number of websites that have been established as centers of online diabetes communities.  These sites provide such services as blogs, articles, diabetes news, and forums where you can exchange messages with other diabetics (or family members of diabetics) in situations similar to yours.

The number of such communities is growing.  Here are links to a few of them:

• Diabetes Connect
• Diabetes Daily
• Tudiabetes

Blogs

There are many, many blogs aimed at people with diabetics.  Like this one, blogs usually consist of a list of relatively short entries about something the blogger is going through or has been thinking about, sort of like an online journal.  (The word "blog" is a shortening of the term "web log".) David Mendoza has compiled a list of many of the Type Two blogs out there, which you can find here.  (This page is a long list of online diabetes resource: the list of bloggers is in a yellow box roughly halfway down the page.

Social Networks

Facebook has a number of pages dealing with diabetes. (I assume other social networks do as well.)  If you're a Facebook user, you can use the search tool to find such pages -- the dLife page is an example.

Twitter

There are quite a few diabetics using Twitter.  In fact, Twitter has become my most important way of connecting with other diabetics.  If you're a Twitter user, follow me at www.twitter.com/rpederse.  By watching who I interact with, and who my friends interact with, you'll find quite a few people making Twitter part of their daily lives.