Doc Searls makes a really good point about the nature of weblogs, and I think it’s relevant to why I chose to move my daily meanderings off of LiveJournal. (Yes, I know some of you are reading them there. Don’t distract me.) He says, inspired by this comment by Clay Shirky, that weblogs are like radio. Webloggers are broadcasting to the world, rather than having a conversation with their readers. And you know, that’s pretty much true.
LiveJournal is much more oriented towards conversations. The community feature is perhaps the most obvious facet of this, but the friends pages are another one. You create a community with your friends page. I’ve had, on occasion, the experience of being surprised that two people on my friends page don’t know each other — “but they post right next to each other! How odd!” And, of course, since everyone can see who you’re friends with, there’s a tendency for friend groups to overlap like crazed Venn diagrams. It’d be kind of fun to crunch some numbers on that, see if it’s possible to find the friend clusters and how much they overlap, but I don’t really have the techniques.
I’d be curious to hear from any of my LJ readers: does my journal there feel any different than anyone else’s? Do you notice that I’m not really writing for that particular submedium? Do I look odd on your friends list, besides that I have links in all my titles and I ramble on at great length?
One Comment
You look odd on my friends list because I read people’s dead journals before I read the LJ friends page, so I’ve already read your postings. So that’s odd.
Otherwise, well, I don’t use my LJ for, y’know. Writing. So I’m not really your target audience for this question. 🙂