Project SNSO: LiveJournal
I thought I’d kick off the project by highlighting one of the blogs I’ve used the longest, LiveJournal. Up until recently, LiveJournal was owned by startup Six Apart, which still owns blogging platforms Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox. Late last year, Six Apart sold their LiveJournal unit to Russian international media company SUP, who had been managing LiveJournal in Russia since 2006.
What is LiveJournal?
LiveJournal (or LJ) describes itself as a journaling community, and they stress the tight-knit nature of the community. Of course, anyone can create an ad-supported journal for free, and you make it as private or public as you like. However, most of LJ’s features are designed specifically to keep the conversation between LJ users inside the community.
An example of this focus is their privacy settings. In addition to public and private entries, by far the most common entry type is called friends locked. This means only people who are listed friends of the person with the post can actually read it. This allows more intimate details to be revealed without fear of the internet at large barging in.
Another tightly-bound feature unique to LJ are the communities. These communities are groups that you can belong to (either by joining or by being invited) and act as moderated message boards that encourage conversation around a topic. You can see what communities are being promoted here.
Of course, these features also give LJ and similar sites such as Vox and Blogger an insular feel. People heavily involved in these sites tend to favor interacting only within them, and generally aren’t interested in interacting on more traditional blogs such as WordPress or Movable Type.
The Shout Out
Due to the community nature of LJ, it is really hard to become well-known across a lot of different circles of friends. So there aren’t really any superstars I can point to and say, you really need to follow these folks. Oh, LiveJournal has its share of drama queens.. it is, after all, a personal journal community. But, oddly enough, there are certain feeds that are syndicated and widely read that seem to be the real cross-network stars. Feeds like XKCD, PostSecret and Wil Wheaton dot Net (WWDN) are very widely read, even if those feeds see little or no reciprocity from their LJ readership.
So, most of the folks I read on LJ I have been following for years. Like old pals that you play poker with once a week, I can count on them to be posting there indefinitely.
You can see a list of the folks I follow (and who follow me) on my profile page, down near the bottom of the page. About two-thirds of them are people I know in Austin. A few of them are friends I know in person.
I’d list them here – but honestly, they wouldn’t care about the attention.
Oh, I will mention Corwin, but only because he runs his own WordPress blog and is on Twitter.
When You Should Consider this Service
If you are looking for an established, sometimes-sleepy, sometimes-high-drama community that is very similar to the the old site The Well, LiveJournal is perfect. There are hundreds of themes to choose from and quite a few customization options. However, it does not allow advertising (other than its own) or special plugins to be run alongside your blog.
Plus, gathering friends is not as easy as just following a bunch of people. It requires interaction and having a shared pool of friends helps a lot. LiveJournal has been known as a tough nut to crack at times, but the reward is having people you can call friends that are interested in your daily life.