Thoughts on LiveJournal
I was introduced to LiveJournal a few years ago when I realised a few of my friends had journals on the system. I was never particularly interested in joining the sytem (or “community” as it were), and not very long after, ended up writing my own sort of journaling software for my web site.
Today, as you probably can tell, I run b2evolution. While I like many things about LiveJournal, I like the flexibility that a stand-alone blog provides me. But let’s talk for a minute about what LiveJournal does that other systems don’t.
The biggest thing is that it has a community. A huge community, in fact. Unlike any other stand-alone blog system in existance, LiveJournal connects friends in a completely seamless manner. And it connects friends to friends-of-friends. Things like this take off and pretty soon you have an online clique. People on LJ spend hours reading and writing things about their daily lives. It’s quite interesting reading the postings of other people’s friends on LJ. You can be instantaneously connected to people who are reading the same journal your reading — and see what their friends have to say.
My own experience and observations would suggest that this is the biggest different between standard bloggers and people using LiveJournal. LiveJournal users tend to write more about esoteric things, in terms of what their friends (and I do literally mean LiveJournal friends) are doing, or things specifically for them. While traditional bloggers can do this, I find that bloggers generally write about more general facets of life, and if they are specific to people, etc., the style somehow differs from that of a typical LiveJournaler.
LJ supports threaded comments, and comment notification that far surpasses anything I’ve seen in any blog software I’ve personally used, and a much better profiling system. While stand-alone blogs support things like commenting, they don’t generally develop into anything much more than a few short comments. And very rarely do I see threaded comments. But this feature alone helps build community, as it further encourages people to comment and have a discussion of their own on someone else’s journal. It can happen where comments develop into their own entities, and exist apart from the original post. It’s kind of neat. Things like pingback and trackback are a great start with standard blogging tools (and something LiveJournal does not even yet support). But they don’t have the same power of connecting people that the LJ community does.
It would be interesting to contrast the demographics of more traditional bloggers to users of LiveJournal. My suspicion is that LJ users are generally younger, less technically savvy, and more social. But I really have nothing to base this on other than my own observations, and even then I can thing of a handful of LJ users that don’t meet these characteristics.
It will be interesting to see how LiveJournal develops over time. Maybe we will even have some sort of merging between LJ and other blogging communties. Maybe us traditional bloggers will be able to more easily integrate with some of the LJ features without hosting our journals on the system. I’m not quite sure what I have in mind, or how it would work — but it would be nice. I do like some of what it has to offer — but I wouldn’t give up the flexibility of my own blog.
