(no subject)

Dyed my hair, finally, so it doesn't look like multi-colored ass anymore.

That's really about all I got done today.

I need to come up with some sort of grocery list so I don't starve while the parents are away.

I want a bowl of Boo Berry. Mind you, I've never even had Boo Berry, but I saw it mentioned on TV and suddenly wanted a bowl.

I hear they sold LJ. Maybe it'll be good for LJ, 'cause apparently the nobodies who bought it are the people who do Movable Type, which I've heard good things about. Maybe it'll be neutral, they'll just sorta leave it alone. Or maybe it'll be horrible, in which case, at least I have another, more comfortable home already set up online, and maybe I could convince some of these LJ folk to move over there. But that's putting the cart way before the horse at this point.

Blogs, LJs, ODs and others -- Thoughts about the merger

So, I hear that LJ is being bought out by the Movable Type people, the people who make blogging software for those hardcore folks in the "blogosphere," those people who own their own domains and run their own independent sites for their blogs.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

I mean, LJ isn't really a blog site. It is, but it isn't. The interface is certainly blog-y, in that you write all on one page, newest items appearing at the top. Depending on your layout, you might have a menu column down one side, like many real blogs, or a custom background or whatever.

LJ has features that blogs don't, though. It had icons, for one. It also has comment threading with the option to have comments e-mailed, which is better than a real blog, I think. And it has communities, which I think is one of the best parts -- integrated into the site is a mechanism for common accounts where everybody can post about a shared interest, something you don't really see anywhere else in such an easy-to-use form.

Then again, blogs have some features of their own. They have trackbacks, enabling easier cross-linking of posts. Most of them have "Blogrolls," too, a list of links to their friends/favorites down one side.

But the bigger difference is one of culture. Real bloggers are about an audience. They post about news, information that they're sharing with the public. They seem to have pseudo-media ambitions, some of them, and quite a few have an inflated sense of self-importance, this need to attract readers and be the site people turn to, to have a big audience and be linked to by the big dogs, the Michelles and Lilekss of the world.

LJers aren't in it for the fame. They don't think they're going to be drawing an audience, and that's fine -- the majority of LJers, much like ODers, are just about writing down what's going on in their lives, hashing out personal issues, sharing opinions, passing around gossip, commenting on trivial stuff, posting quizzes, stuff like that. It's about writing down what you're thinking and reading what your friends are thinking. If you and your two closest friends are the only ones who read your LJ, that's fine.

The culture is really more OD-ish than blog-ish. On OD, there are some people who don't have any audience at all -- they're personal journals, kept online but set up so nobody but the writer can read them. Some people have just a few favorites (/friends) who read or are allowed to read their stuff, while others invite everybody to read. OD has features that LJ doesn't, of course, and LJ has a few that OD doesn't, but their cultures are similar. It's not about drawing a crowd -- it's about keeping a journal, and it's also about finding people with whom you have things in common, people who make it less like a site and more like a community. To some extent, LJ is like that, too, not like the elitist complex of the self-aggrandizing blogger folk.

So where will LJ end up now that it's being taken over by forces from the blog side? Who knows? If I were buying LJ, I'd leave it alone, 'cause it seems to be doing pretty well as is. I certainly wouldn't try to push the LJers toward the world of real blogs, 'cause they're just two different cultures -- push the LJers, and they're likely to seek out more friendly, communal terrain, perhaps at OD or perhaps at one of the LJ clones that are out there.