Hello World

I haven't written anything substantive here in months. That's kind of weird. Unfortunately, that streak is not ending tonight, but maybe I'll clue you guys in on something.

Here's the situation. I have this lovely livejournal, in which I have been blathering since, well, just over 5 years ago! But I also have another blog, which I'm not linking to here because in this instance I'm not trying to convince you to read it. I've been trying for the last year or two to figure out a logical way to bifurcate my frivolous internet writing between the two sites (I won't even bring my placeholder blogger blog or my TWO pointless vox accounts into this discussion), and I haven't had much success. The closest I've gotten so far is to try to put boring stuff about my life on LJ and put boring impersonal stuff (mostly Redskins fan nonsense and utterly dry analyses of internet/technology issues) on my other site. Also, you guys get to read the one line posts about things like meatcake or Hummer defacement.

Would it be better to just put everything in one place? If I stopped writing here, would any of you read what I posted elsewhere? Does it make any sense to stop writing in LJ but keep reading friends' posts? Should I abandon one, or the other (or both)?

THIS IS JUST LIKE AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS, but even less interesting to read about.

I'm so glad that Gmail finally has a version that works on IE with ActiveX turned off. The King is dead; long live the King.

I've been thinking about blog layouts and design and LiveJournal's strengths/weaknesses as a platform.

Some of the things I like about LJ include:

• The way comments are displayed as threads instead of as one long string.
  
• The built-in community features that make it easy to subscribe to and read lots of journals at once.
  
• The simplicity of selecting one of many layouts, and the limited but versatile customization options (colors, basic layout adjustments, etc).
  
• Cuts (like the one in this post), which make it easy to keep your main page neat and manageable.

Some of the things I don't like about LJ include:

• I can't use javascript in sidebar content.
  
• It's a serious hassle to do any extensive custom coding, since LJ has its own formatting language that you have to learn before you can get into the guts of changing your layout.
  
• Most of the world thinks LiveJournal hosts teenage goth girls exclusively, which does very little to enhance the credibility of anyone who writes here.
  
• No trackbacks, no simple way to see referral URLs, no invisible counter functionality (all of which would be simple for LJ to implement).

I've also got a pretty specific layout idea that LJ definitely doesn't offer me. As far as I can tell, nobody else does, either. ( Here's what I want: )

I'm thinking, eventually, about switching from LJ to something else, although as far as I can tell the only way to get exactly what I want is to code it myself, from the ground up--and, as awesome as I think I am, I'm pretty sure that's beyond my capabilities/free time. Does anyone out there (especially people who operate blogs outside of blogger/LJ) have thoughts or suggestions?

If you google my name, the #1 site is about me. It's been a long slog--for a while, all I got were pages like this one (a list of surnames), and this one (related to the fact that my last name is also a dorm at Johns Hopkins) and this ridiculous one (my alter ego is apparently enrolled in the School of Hard Knocks).

So now it's my Flickr page, DCist music reviews, and sundry immature articles from my college newspaper that mention me.

But not this blog. And I think that's probably good news. Or, you know, it was, until I wrote this.

WE R RUNED!@!!!!!! [annoying ad required]

For a service whose active users number in the millions, LiveJournal's demographics skew athwart the mainstream: younger, more female and more resistant to the dominant culture. And in a business climate where the word "blog" is on every other Web observer's lips, even the tools used by the alienated have become desirable to investors. Thus the news, confirmed on Thursday, that the company had been purchased by the venture-capital-backed blogging technology start-up Six Apart. For those of us who care about keeping space open for anyone who veers from the straight and narrow, this business deal is cause for concern.

From here, the author goes on to say that LiveJournal's sale is A THREAT TO THE LIVES OF ITS DEPRESSED AND LONELY USER BASE. Well, that's practically what the article says. I guess a more responsible way to summarize it would be to say that the author expresses concern that Six Apart may not respect the differences between LiveJournal's user base and that of the general "blogosphere" (can we please come up with a better word for it?) and that this would be very bad for the "freaks, geeks and queers" who "need LiveJournal." Keep in mind that the next sentence in the article expresses the hope that Six Apart will "treat LJers with nonpatronizing respect." Oh, sweet irony.

edit 1: Anyway, I wouldn't consider myself an expert in blogging software, business practice, or sociology, but nothing about this deal screams out "disaster" to me. Is there a risk that Six Apart will totally screw up LJ? Sure, but I don't think that risk is much greater than it was before the sale, and Six Apart brings resources to the table that can greatly improve LJ, too. Things like linking LJs to TypePad and Movable Type blogs, which seem to scare danah boyd, those things appeal to me. I'd love to have track back support, more versatile publishing options, a larger support community, and an increase in users all contributing. So I guess I disagree strongly with the suggestion that this sale is inherently stupid or dangerous.

And what the fuck is up with the lower case byline? Your name is Danah Boyd, okay? e. e. cummings got away with that shit, but he was a fucking genius. YOU'RE NOT.

edit 2: I may have been a little harsh. Lowercase if you want to, ms. boyd, but most people are going to find it pretentious/precious/annoying. I guess you probably know that already, though, so carry on.

Hee hee hee. How many bloggers think they're being ironic when they link to this story about compulsive blogging? Probably a lot.

This part hit a little close to home:

Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves.

This is, technically, a livejournal. It's like a blog, except it's much easier to get a bunch of people to half-heartedly read what you write. See, LJ people want to be loved, so they pretend to love other people so that the other people will pretend to love them back. It's quite disgusting, really, but it is what it is. And that's why people read mine--because I pretend to care about them.

Anyway, most people on LJ write, with varying degrees of skill, accounts of their day-to-day lives, and although there's a smattering of that in my LJ, I try to write about things that might actually be of interest to strangers who don't know me or care about me (or have any reason to pretend to care about me). Some of the things that interest me are technology, politics, grammar, literature, and pop culture. This means that you are probably bored to tears by at least 40% of what I like, but on the other hand you're not likely to hate everything I like.

If you know me in real life, and you read this thing, let me know. You are familiar with the fact that I am an egotistical, self-centered person, so you surely understand why I crave attention and accolades. Give them to me.

If you don't know me in real life, and you read this thing, let me know. I am an egotistical, self-centered person, and I crave attention and accolades. Give them to me.

Oh, and I guess this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License by me, calamityjake. That sounds iron-clad to me.