tinyjo: (butterfly)
Over at Hydragenic is an interesting post inspired by the whole LJ/SA thing. Said post also links to an interesting article - tightly knit bonds in weblogging, written by Mena Trott on her blog in July 2004. I was going to post this as a comment there, but as it's turning a bit essayish, I think I'll post here and experiment with manual trackbacking.

Mena's article discusses types of weblogs/why people blog and in some ways covers some fairly well worn ground, although the story of her changing attitudes to her blog I found quite interesting*. One of the main things that struck me though was the feeling that this piece feels very strongly as if it was influenced by the planned purchase of LJ, which must have already been in the works at the time. In particular, the dream of a mixed security system is pretty close to fully realised over here.** It also reminded me of the benefits of LJ as an introduction to the blogging world though.

I think that in Mena's terms, I've always been a diarist. At the time I opened my LJ account I wasn't really aware of weblogging at all, never having been a very exploratory type of web browser. Alex mentioned the site to me and after looking round, I decided to join up just to see what would happen. I saw things totally in the LJ context of posting being a way to share things with my friends who were using the service and as I got into the flow, I encouraged more and more of them to join. I knew all about Google, but a personal philosophy of being basically completely honest with people because it's easier made it fairly easy for me to feel comfortable about what I wrote; I felt that I was happy for anyone I knew to read what I wrote and if people I didn't know wanted to read it, I didn't mind, but it seemed unlikely that they would care.

I can't remember now how I first became aware of wider weblogging. Perhaps it was from [livejournal.com profile] zoo_music_girl linking to the then not.so.soft blog, which was quite a diary-style site and hence appealing. Somehow though, I stumbled onto more blogs and writing about blogs (the Rebecca Blood article, for instance). The idea of a blogging A-list arrived in my conciousness and I gave more serious consideration than the question deserved to whether I would want to be a celebrity blogger.

Anyway, the point is this. If my first encounters with weblogging had been through the A-list and those running their blogs on their own sites, I probably wouldn't have started one. I didn't have anything particular I needed to say, and I was under little illusion of how fascinating I was. Coming to blogging through LiveJournal gave me a chance to start regularly self publishing without feeling pretentious about it, and in the process, gave me a creative and personal outlet it had never occurred to me that I wanted. And because I came into blogging this way, I have never really ended up feeling pressured by my site to be interesting, or even regular as a poster. It encouraged me to post for me and let people choose to be interested or not. Seeing what has happened to some popular sites and what other popular bloggers have written, I feel lucky to have taken the route I did.

Between embedding my journal in my domain and the advent of customizable comments pages on LJ, it would be easy not to notice that my journal wasn't a hosted blog if you found it via my site and I now feel like I'm getting the best of both worlds. I've got my LJ friends, who I really do feel like I'm friends with. We read each-others lives and comment whenever we've got something to say. And I've also got my journal out there, on the very edge of the weblogging world. I doubt that many people read it, but there's probably a few who do (hello!) and they're welcome too. I've got my niche, and thanks very much LJ for helping me find it with minimum angst***

* That's often what I like about weblogging as a reader. People's personal take/experience on something is always more interesting to me than a straight analysis.
** We just need to allow non-LJ users to authenticate too and then we'll be there. I wonder what happened about that.
*** Disclaimer: this sentence not representative of LJ as a whole :)

Date: January 10th, 2005 04:50 pm (UTC)From: [personal profile] liv
liv: A woman with a long plait drinks a cup of tea (teapot)
Very interesting links, thank you.

I think my trajectory is almost the opposite of yours; I had been reading traditional blogs before I joined LJ, and was toying with the idea of starting one of my own. I wasn't sure if I had enough to say or enough time to keep it up though. Then I found two or three of my quite good friends were on LJ. I was soon reading enough different journals regularly that not having an account was getting annoying.

At first I intended my journal as primarily a feed reader and secondarily a blog, but as more and more of my friends joined up it became more of a social activity for me. The more I've used LJ the less I've been shy about writing personal diary type stuff that's only interesting to my friends; after all, I do have several dozen of my friends reading and they make up probably over half my audience, so why not?

I have also tried to treat my journal like a blog though. LJ isn't necessarily well geared to that, but I have been doing things like joining blog rings and other meta-blog type organizations. And I use my LJ address when I comment on other non-LJ blogs, so I'm sort of establishing a (minor) identity in the "blogosphere". Last time I was vanity googling, I was surprised (and pleased) to discover that my LJ has been traded, and is even doing relatively well, on Blogshares.

Date: January 10th, 2005 05:55 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] shepline.livejournal.com
If my first encounters with weblogging had been through the A-list and those running their blogs on their own sites, I probably wouldn't have started one. I didn't have anything particular I needed to say, and I was under little illusion of how fascinating I was. Coming to blogging through LiveJournal gave me a chance to start regularly self publishing without feeling pretentious about it, and in the process, gave me a creative and personal outlet it had never occurred to me that I wanted.

Precisely the same as to how I came into weblogging. Actually, I see my livejournal as more of a *journal* than a *weblog*. I'm not sure if I can fully articulate what the difference is at the moment, but in my mind there seems to be one.

Date: January 10th, 2005 09:54 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] hydragenic.livejournal.com
Ooh, look at you pinging away! Hopefully one of the results of the acquisition is that this sort of interoperability will become automated.

I never realised that your journal was called "Composing Myself" until i got your Trackback ping. Is that a relatively recent thing, or have I been steadfastly ignoring the title for years? I'll change it on my blogroll.

"I didn't have anything particular I needed to say, and I was under little illusion of how fascinating I was." Didn't stop me, dear ;-)

Date: January 11th, 2005 09:22 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] tinyjo.livejournal.com
Hopefully one of the results of the acquisition is that this sort of interoperability will become automated.

Yup - Brad mentioned trackback in the announcement post and it made me laugh because a friend of my ([livejournal.com profile] crschmidt) has been pushing for trackback on LJ practically ever since it came out. Now though, it might actually happen!

Is that a relatively recent thing, or have I been steadfastly ignoring the title for years? I'll change it on my blogroll.

I picked it some time last year - I got bored with just being plain :) I haven't always remembered when I've commented on other sites though, so I can hardly blame you for not noticing!

It hadn't occured to me that a side-effect of your experimentation would of course be an account you could comment with. I'll add it to my friends list so you can automatically comment unscreened.

Date: January 11th, 2005 09:35 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] hydragenic.livejournal.com
It hadn't occured to me that a side-effect of your experimentation would of course be an account you could comment with. I'll add it to my friends list so you can automatically comment unscreened.

You know, it hadn't occured to me either until I actually came to leave the comment and saw the "Username" field.

Must work out how to do that thing that makes Hydragenic's RSS feed available to LJ users as a pseudo-friend.

Date: January 11th, 2005 09:50 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] hydragenic.livejournal.com
Must work out how to do that thing that makes Hydragenic's RSS feed available to LJ users as a pseudo-friend.

Ah, apparently only Paid or Permanent users can do this. So, if anyone out there fancies creating "hydragenicdotcom"... :-)

Date: January 12th, 2005 10:23 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] tinyjo.livejournal.com
*waves magic wand*

Your wish is my command, but your username can only be 15 characters long, so I present [livejournal.com profile] hydragenic_com :)

I've been meaning for a while to do a sweep of the blogs on my link list with RSS feeds actually. Must remember to check the rest of them.

Date: January 12th, 2005 08:53 pm (UTC)From: [identity profile] hydragenic.livejournal.com
Thanks!

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Emptied of expectation. Relax.

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