Thoughts on Live Journal

[robinturner]

[Note the delicious syntactic ambiguity.] I was thinking about writing about my past and current experience of blogging and Live Journal but Remembering LiveJournal, Or, My Search for Online Community by Esmé Weijun Wang sums it up uncannily well. (Except for the personal stuff, of course.)

Comments

[blorky.livejournal.com]

Dunno - FWIW, when people tease me about my defense of LJ as a great experience, you're one of the people I think of. The new forums I can find don't have that feeling that if you go 3 friends lists out from someone you know IRL, you will meet the most extraordinary person. That's gone, but so was the amazing dinner I made three years ago. Handle it gracefully, Heraclitus...

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

So depressing! I still think LJ is the best of all the social media platforms, and I'm sad that so many people are dropping off. Maybe my fault for not adding new people. I must admit that I don't post as much as I used to because the back-and-forth conversation has seemed to drop off as well, and that's hugely important to me.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'm going to make an effort to post more on LJ, as it's still the best place for things that are longer than a status update but shorter than a major article. One of the things that makes it good is that you can use it in any way you like. Facebook and Twitter limit you to short and very short posts respectively, while "serious" blogging platforms create this expectation that you have to write something substantial and professional.

Incidentally, I was playing Guild Wars some time back and a friend there introduced me to another player saying "He's on LJ too," to which she replied, "Good - I like people who can write."

[solri.livejournal.com]

Google+ is perhaps like that, but there's more of a celebrity gap. For some reason LJ is used by a lot of fantasy and SF writers, and here I can not only comment on a post by ELizabeth Moon or Suzette Haden Elgin. there's a good chance I'll get a reply, which is not something I can see happening much in Google+.

What I would really like is to be able to feed my LJ into my Google+ stream but I haven't worked out how to do it yet.