About Leonie

Overview: Leonie Smith is an internet early adopter with over 15 years of online community experience as a online support group forum participant and administrator since 1995. She and Anne Porter started the “Aussie Deaf Kids” website and online forum for parents of children with a hearing impairment, where she is still a moderator of the group. Her involvement in online support groups started in 1996, when her first son was born premature and she found support online.

Leonie Smith The Cyber Safety

Leonie has over 6 years hands-on experience in utilising Social Media, Blogging and YouTube for marketing and networking.

Virtual Online Communities

As a Virtual Media pioneer, with over 250 internet T.V productions to her name, her ground breaking online virtual digital media TV shows are featured in both the “Australian Centre Of The Moving Image“ in Melbourne and in the Australian Film and Sound Archives.

As a Jazz vocalist of some 20 years, Leonie was one of the first independent Jazz musicians to use online music sharing sites and eventually iTunes and CD Baby to sell her music.

Leonie was the first Australian Women to stream her live music shows into Second Life in front of online audiences. She brought other Aussie Jazz musicians like the legends of Australian Jazz, George Golla and Ray Aldridge, Craig Scott and others into Second Life with her. This led to a collaboration with Treet.tv to create an online TV talk show that included musical guests. Leonie’s virtual TV Talk show Tonight Live With Paisley Beebe was launched in May 2007 on Treet.tv and ran until May 2011, with an average of 20 thousand viewers per week. Her other productions with Treet.tv include ”Fabulous Fashion With Angie Mornington” and “Live n Kickin” a live music show.

Leonie’s work is on permanent exhibit as being the world pioneer virtual media producer at ACMI (Australian Centre Of The Moving Image) in Melbourne. .

Three episodes of Leonie’s flagship virtual TV show “Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe” are included in The Australian Film and Sound archives. as examples of worlds first digital media productions filmed live in a virtual world

Some of the real life “Stars” Leonie has interviewed on her virtual TV show include Eric Whitacre a world leading Grammy awarded Conductor, a New York Times award winning author Michael Stackpole, HBO documentary Director Robbie Kenner of “Food Inc” Tony Dyson the creator of the Star Wars Robot R2D2. All 250 episodes of Leonie’s T.V shows are up on www.treet.tv/shows/tonightlive .It’s amazing who is in virtual worlds! Social media, YouTube and blogs were a huge part of the success of these shows, that are still being watched.

Graphic Design:

Leonie Smith started her working life as a Graphic Designer in 1981 after attending Randwick Tech’s prestigious Graphic Design course. She has has had her illustrations published in books, and in the later years worked mainly freelance as a designer and a desktop publisher. She designed her first website for Aussie Deaf Kids in 1998. Leonie still works as a Graphic Designer for her clients designing blogs, Facebook Welcome pages and backdrops for social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter.

Radio

Leonie was a local radio host for over 3 years for Sydney radio station 99.3FM where she hosted her own Jazz show and also did morning radio. Leonie found there was a much larger audience online and moved her show first to Second Life, and then as a podcast on Digital Breezes.

Digital Breezes

As the founder of her business Digital Breezes Leonie consults on social media, technology and its culture, she designs social media pages and backgrounds, offers computing solutions for small business and home computing and is an advocate and speaker for Cyber Safety. She writes about all these interests on www.digitalbreezes.com and www.thecybersafetylady.com.au and also writes for ABC Technology + Gaming and other online and offline publications.

Presenting skills:

Leonie has a diploma in drama from The Ensemble Studios and a Presentation & Facilitation Certificate of Training and Development from Inform Training and Research Pty Ltd.