by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

Writing about the world's oldest blogger may seem a little impolite after yesterday's post about how bloggers are a bunch of parasites. But because timing is everything in news and comedy….

Foreign Policy magazine – whose cover story this month probes the weighty question "Who won in Iraq?" – is probably as unlikely a place as any to find a discussion of something as inconsequential as who the world's oldest blogger might be but it's all grist for the publication's blog.

Olive Riley of Australia, a 107-year-old great-great-grandmother, started blogging on Feb. 16, bumping Maria Amelia of Spain (95), Allan Loof of Sweden(94), and Don Crowdis of Thornhill, Ont. (93) – who is one of the few remaining survivors of the Halifax Explosion and was the first host of CBC's The Nature of Things – from the top spot.

Foreign Policy quotes an excerpt from Riley's latest blog post, which is too precious to pass up here:

Good afternoon everyone. This is Olive here. First, I want to thank all of you who visited my blob. Gerard says there’ve been 192,000 visits but that can’t be right.

Mike
"It’s a blog, Ollie. Not a blob."

Olive
"Oh, really?"

Mike, who is helping Riley with the blog by typing her words, happens to have a Canadian connection.

He's none other than Michael Rubbo, the writer and director of the Canadian classic film Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller, and the Emmy award-winning Vincent and Me, along with a slew of National Film Board documentaries, including what may be his best-known work, Waiting for Fidel.

In 2005 Rubbo made a documentary film called All About Olive, which chronicled Riley's journey back to Broken Hill where she was born in 1899 in the British Colony of New South Wales two years before Australia became a country.

Small world.