Coincidence for me that you wrote this. Recently I found out someone that I respected had a live journal blog and I did a blogsnob double take. Then I started thinking that maybe I was missing something. It's one of those things where some of the more interesting writing is when people don't think that their boss/spouse/family member is going to read it. So many blogs it seems, like mine, become what I call 50% grey.

TGF and I are over there, as are the old talk.bizarre Usenet vanguard who are mostly responsible for drawing me there.
I understand that LJ is favored by whiny teenagers, but I don't have to read theirs.

don't tell anyone, but i have a livejournal, too (shh!). but i keep it real! i post online quizzes and complain a lot about stupid stuff, just like a real livejournalist.

i think LJ gets a bad rap among bloggers just like gay pride parades do on the news -- that is, every time the news shows file footage of a gay pride parade, they pick the most outrageous and bizarre shot they can find. folks love pointing at drag queens, and they love pointing at LJ drama.
what npr show was this? i'd love to hear that embarassing blogger's performance.

i think LJ gets a bad rap among bloggers just like gay pride parades do on the news -- that is, every time the news shows file footage of a gay pride parade, they pick the most outrageous and bizarre shot they can find. folks love pointing at drag queens, and they love pointing at LJ drama.
what npr show was this? i'd love to hear that embarassing blogger's performance.

urgh. sorry about the double-post. i got a "didn't go through, try again later" the first time.

Ug, this is so so very true. I have a secret LJ that I use at times, and I find myself desperately wishing that Six Apart would merge some of their MT/LJ tools into one privacy-controlled program. How great would it be if non-logged in users saw one version of my page, and logged in users (approved by me) saw another version, with all the good shit included? Word Press does this, and I'm waiting for MT to get on the bandwagon too.

I still blog daily, but lordy it's sterile.

The thing about Livejournal is one must remember how *huge* it's user base is. And then one must also remember that a queer facet of the Internet is for something so big and sprawling, Internet memes can make it seem awfully small and unvaried.

So for example, of the millions of Livejournal users, a few people can make a few hundred or thousand "drama bloggers" famous and spread a meme across the entire Net that "this is what LJ is". And honestly, we ourselves fall prey to this thinking and allow the item in quesiton - such as LJ - to be filed away in a neat little file in our brain. The Net is really terrible for this sadly... all you have to get a pack of meme-happy nerds to pass around a stereotype, and suddenly it seems as if the stereotype is everywhere. And if it's everywhere it must be true, right?

I suppose the point is merely that there's a *lot* to LJ, given the size of the community... many sides, many demographics.

Isn't this just like people who get pissed when their favorite band hits MTV and suddenly becomes "uncool"?

And 1999 was years after some of us started our personal, frequently-updated websites.

I had a personal blog from 2000/2001 on, and I killed it earlier this year - in favor of Livejournal - because there were more of my breed of geeks (media fans) there. I was just getting more readers and feedback on LJ. And hell, on average the geek community blog I run now gets less comments than my livejournal does.

I think the thing about LJ is that it really encourages community in a much more natural way than regular blogs ever have - at least in my experience. You don't have to be particulary web-savvy to start one up. Within a few months of getting an LJ, I'd turned more friends onto 'blogging' than I ever expected.

Emily, I think you missed the point. I'm not complaining that weblogging/blogging has become popular, I am observing that those of us who used to have public conversations through our weblogs have retreated inward, to places where folks like you can't stumble in, misunderstand what's going on, and spout off some tired, broke-ass cliché about MTV that isn't relevant to the post.

Eh, personally I have an account with LiveJournal mainly because I've had it since early 2000. Back when I joined membership had just made it over 2000 users and it was mainly something done for fun by the original dev team. Imagine my suprise when I found my friends using it a year or two later.

Is LJ a "serious" blog? Hell no. It's just what it purports to be a simple, efficient online journal (I recall early posts by the devs like "I'm going off to the park for a few hours."). The early clients were designed so that you could leave a simple text box up on your screen all the time and post stuff randomly. The fact that it's become popular among young teens and that young teens tend to have lives filled with whining and idiotic intra-clique drama has less to do with what makes LiveJournal what it is and more to do with the fact that anything popular with idiotic young teens is going to be like that.

I have a couple of LJs. I use one to comment and read on my friends posts and another to just post random stuff I don't want associated with me. I also happen to have met my GF via LJ. We've been together for nearly 5 years now.

I stopped my "formal" weblog (whatever that might entail) a few months back because, increasingly, I found myself writing things but never hitting "publish", namely because I've been increasingly wary of making my half-baked rants public in such a fashion.

Whereas with my LJ I can just bang out any small thing, it's not going to offend people or attract stupid comments from chuckleheads.

Anyway, my observation is that a lot of the annoying angsty teens seem to have moved on to myspace.

I initially got into LJ not to post myself, but to read what my friends were writing. The LJ Friends page is an at-a-glance look at what everyone I know or admire is up to. It's like an RSS reader that creates a nicely formatted page with pictures and icons intact; much more interesting than lines of sterile text.

And I know if I do post something, no matter how infrequently, at least a certain number of people will likely read it. My regular blog has been around since 2001 and nobody reads it.

Hrm? LiveJournal is such a large group that it's nearly impossible to say what a LiveJournal would be like. The list of people that I read on LJ tends to mirror my own interests: many people on the left-libertarian side of politics, talking intelligently about politics, society, culture, and... cute, furry animals. (Well, we have to have SOMETHING different, don't we?)

It isn't that LJ is "favored" by whiny teens, but that they can afford it, and so many of them use it.

And, while it does afford the easy abilty to lock people out of the arena, what it better affords is an interleaved blogroll, with built in comments; and allows for one to disable comments on those occasions when one feels they would discract, or are not wanted.

I have one because it was easy; and recommended by friends (some of whom keep other blogs as well).

I happen to like that I can, as with typekey, keep those who are planning to make a drive by piece of obnoxious behavior at bay, and can do so without actually preventing those who are not members from taking part.

TK

Ariel: Lj does this. One need not log in to see ljs, and if one is listed as a "friend" (a terrible locution) then locked posts become visible.

It's not seamless, as one can't just look at a list without logging in, but the system already works this way.

TK

What I ended up doing was moving things to a gmail mailing list. We've got about 30 people or so onboard, pretty much all friends and friends of friends, While I miss the occasional interesting comment or emails from random readers, I do prefer the two-sided and more intimate conversation and the lack of spam.

I have an LJ account as well, although that is pretty much used for commenting and reading a handful of journals/communities.

I have an email account with AOL. But on Wrtie Mail there is no no facility "Save As Draft". I am filing it difficult to find it and also I am unable how to report it to AOL as there is no email contact on AOL HOme page.

Can any one help.

Thanks and regards

Javed