In the fall of 1996, the Web was introduced to the television audience. For the first time, viewers were able to browse the web directly from their television sets with the aid of WebTV. In November 1996 I met the corporate evangelist for WebTV, John Lee, who, knowing I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, home to the world's largest ballooning event, asked me to consider building a web site to showcase ballooning for the benefit of the WebTV viewers. He dubbed me the "Balloon Lady from Albuquerque" and when he set up my WebTV account for me, he created my e-mail address. The first time I signed on to WebTV, I learned I was balloonlady@webtv.com. As I began to e-mail friends and colleagues to share my view of their webs from WebTV, they caught on to the "Balloon Lady" alias. Those who weren't already calling me by another alias latched on to that one, too. Live goes on... Microsoft bought WebTV, John is enjoying retirement.

Ballooning International™, the ballooning site I originally built at John's request, became one of the most popular ballooning sites on the Internet. So today, I have more than just a few friends labeling me as the Balloon Lady. As far as I can tell, the number has reached the high hundreds. Recently one of the visitors to Ballooning International pointed out to me that I had to be the person who has published more ballooning pages in HTML than anyone else around the world (literally in the thousands at this point). Thus, I deserved the title of Balloon Lady. You be the judge. Just don't forget my real name is Barbara and my friends call me Barb.

Barb At Work