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LiveJournal Buyout Rumor
Aaron B. Russell writes "Om Malik reports that Six Apart are looking to buy blogging community LiveJournal.com. Rumour? I hope so. I seriously hope so. Neither Six Apart nor Danga Interactive (the company behind LiveJournal) have commented on the situation yet. What impact will this have for the users and volunteers over at LiveJournal? Chris Schmidt, a volunteer at LiveJournal, hypothesizes here(1) and here(2) ." Sources close to LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick say this is just a rumor, and that LJ is not being sold. Update: 01/06 by J : Our sources were way wrong.
As a LiveJournal user who's about to celebrate my journal's 3rd birthday, and who's young and female enough not to be embarrassed about it, I doubt most LJ users will know or care. It would be stupid to make more than minor changes to the interface, and if they do, I'm sure old interfaces will be selectable options (as is the case now). The fact is that the vast majority of LJ users came on when the site stopped requiring invite codes to join and feel very little connection with the LJ community as a whole--certainly, no obligation to become paid members just to support the site, or volunteer as coders, testers, or what not. I honestly don't think any of these people will notice anything beyond interface changes, except "Hey, my journal's loading faster than usual. Sweet!"
/. nerds wants to be associated with online diaries. Eeeeew.
I think it's telling that the blurbs about LJ don't mention that it's open source. Yeah, it's cool when it's an OS or a browser or a media format, but what movement of
While LJ toyed with the idea of placing adverts on the free account journals, the idea was discarded. This is largely one of the reasons that I *love* LiveJournal: they offer enough basic services for the majority of users to enjoy the site with free accounts, and enough bonus features to make it worthwhile for a small percentage of users to upgrade and thus cover LJ's costs.
/., I find many of the advertisements obnoxiously tacky and intrusive, and I have no desire to pay for the service, unfortunately.
While I also love
I'll take a guess and guess that LiveJournal is in the top 5 of open source projects. By popular I mean user count.
If you are looking at popularity by name count, it might even rival Linux.
It seems to be the norm here that people dislike blogs that don't have a "purpose." What exactly is the problem with these? Is anyone here being forced to read blogs about random nonesense? Does it cause some sort of serious problem? If you want to complain about blogs, complain about the ones run by pseudo-intellectuals who feel they should have some sort of say in the world. Most of the livejournal community are just people interested in social networking. Yes, many blogs will just be random bullshit that no one except the poster will ever care about. But, so what? The people flaming blogging in general probably just need somewhere to vent outside of slashdot, a blog maybe?
So much of the criticism about blogging that I have seen seems to be embodied in LJ. Most of the real blogs I have seen that use WordPress or MovableType seem to be done by people who are at least semi-serious about what they write. Most MT users I have seen, for example, put at least a modicum of thought into what they write and it's rarely about their life unless it affects the direction of the blog or is amusing to the readers.
LJs are appropriate for people who want to help people in their lives who are far away keep up with what's going on in their life and stuff like that. They don't seem to be very useful for much else. Blogs on the other hand tend to be focused on issues like politics, coding, music, etc.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The entire purpose of having a journal online is to share it with others. While I don't post every miniscule thought, reaction, or whine, I do record what recent experiences I found to be either interesting, insightful, or funny - sound familiar??
And I do enjoy reading entries written by my real life friends who also use LiveJournal or some other blog. It's a good way to catch up with many friends within a few minutes without having to wait for a reasonable hour of the day and picking up a phone to find out. The benefits of using a blog service such as livejournal are recording key moments in one's life... and being able to share them with friends - if you... have any.