September 02, 2007	Sunday	Sha'aban 19, 1428

MADRID: She is billed as the world’s oldest blogger. At the age of 95 and with a worldwide following that has seen more than 340,000 hits on her blog, Spaniard Maria Amelia Lopez has achieved the kind of status that millions of younger internet chroniclers can only dream of.

Lopez, who was introduced to the world of blogging by one of her grandchildren just eight months ago, has become such a global hit that she receives posts in languages as strange and impossible for her to understand as Russian, Japanese and Arabic.

“My name is Amelia and I was born in Muxia (A Coruna — Spain) on December 23, 1911,” she wrote as her first post on amis95.blogspot.com. “Today it’s my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog.”

With a mix of humour, warmth, optimism, nostalgia and feisty outbursts of leftwing polemic, she has won a regular readership of people keen to find out just what this Spanish great-grandmother is going to say or do next.

“You have to live life,” the silver-haired blogger said in her most recent post. “Not sit around in an armchair waiting for death.”

Her blog tracks not just a nonagenarian’s day-to-day battles against aches, but offers musings on everything from politics and religion to broadband and death.

“Internet has given me a new lease of life,” she said.

Her grandson Daniel, with whom she lives, taught her to navigate the internet after she pestered him to download biographies of poets and politicians. She likes to read online newspapers, for which she boosts the font size, and stay up-to-date with medical and scientific advances.

The blog was a gift from Daniel, who had no idea what he was unleashing into cyberspace. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service