Maybe the logic from LiveJournal's point of view was "We think Mena would make a cute goth".

yes. took the words right out of my mouth. (not entirely sure how i got here, but i've been hopping posts talking about this potential merger all evening.)

i joined LJ back in the summer of 2000 (as one of those early adopters everyone's so jealous of ;) ) with a bunch of my friends. at that point in time, i had a separate blog, but over the years, i grew to primarily use my LJ. why? because my friends were on LJ. i go to one page and see all of my friends' recent posts - it's the community. i've brought friends into this community; i've volunteered in support, and after five years, it really is an online home to me. more of my friends have LJs than don't, and this was not the case when the "blogging revolution" came around - they weren't even interested in having a so-called "internet presence." most of them still aren't; they're on LJ to keep up with their friends' day-to-day lives, because it's easier than email.

LJ humanized the internet for a lot of my slightly less tech-savvy friends. While blogs made it so that you could say anything, LJ perfected the feel of someone always being there to listen. And I agree that Six Apart's fundamental mission seems to run against that particular je ne sais quoi.

That being said, all we can do is watch and wait for official word to come.

It would be stupid for SixApart to buy Live Journal and squelch or significantly alter the culture. People sell companies or seek financing so they can grow. If you think the architecture or community of LJ is important, perhaps it can be stimulated by the injection of capital and expertise from MT? If growth is a bad idea for LJ, then this rumor could be bad news indeed. But without growth LJ might not evolve, and evolution is one of the most exciting things happening online.

danah - what if LJ culture and architecture permeated the SixApart/MT product line? Wouldn't that be a good outcome? Let's look positive here.

That's the thing Justin - i'm not sure it would be a good thing. I mean, HotTopicification of mainstream culture isn't really what goths and ravers want. [And then there are the gravers.] Just because it works for the underground doesn't mean it should be adopted by the mainstream - that's often completely opposite to what oppressed groups want.

I don't think that Six Apart would be stupid enough to actually try to squelch or alter the culture - i just think that they will by putting their rubber stamp on it. It's kinda like Playboy putting a rubber stamp on Suicide Girls. Affiliation alone affects the culture, like it or not.

I think that LJ is growing plenty on its own, evolving plenty on its own. And i really don't see what LJers gain by being affiliated with 6A. ::sigh::

I thought that some of the appeal of LJ was that it is not complicated to use. Lots of people I know who have LJs don't identify themselves as bloggers. They see it as more of a easy-to-use public diary. Heck, without outbound links, I'd have to agree with them.

If SixApart starts adding MoveableType-esque features to the free version of LJ, would those teenagers and LJ purists stick with it?

Some good points in here. As an "ubergeek LJer," I've been trying to stradle the line between having my blog/journal act as a typical "friends-based" online journal vs. having it being taken seriously in the MovableType-based blogging world.

One positive I can see coming out of the SA purchase is that it would give an air of legitimacy to LJ which is viewed by so many in the online world as a mostly teen-based tool. While the stats indicate that it is teen-dominated, for those of us non-teen LJ users, it would be nice to see the same legitmacy given to thoughtful LJ bloggers just like the current top-level domain bloggers.

As to your point on the mainstream-ification of LJ in a post SA-LJ merged world... the existance of subcultures and oppressed groups on LJ is not why I (and I think many other LJ users) use the service. I use it because it's the most balanced of all of the lightweight publishing systems I've tried... easy to use, powerful, customizable, interoperable thru syndication, and with a great set of community features built in.

While I do agree that the non-mainstream LJ users will feel alienated... they'll stay since a better alternative to LJ does not yet exist.

i think the best thing that SA could do is help guide the LJers about syndication. that would start to bridge the gaps between a well knitted community and those with MT installed.

i never enjoyed LJ because i never had control over everything. i hoped to xanga, modblog, and tried out blogger. i still couldn't get the control i was looking for (installing plugins, etc.). so i opted to get hosting and the guts to install MT. definitely worth it - but if you don't want power, and just care about getting your word out there, then MT is not for you.

Ario - that's part of my point - i think it's terrible for LJ to receive Six Apart "legitimacy" (a.k.a. mainstream culture legitimacy). That ruins the key value of LJ IMHO. Fuck those who think it's teen dominated - that's their problem. I don't think that LJ's primary goal should be a lightweight tool for those who are deciding between blogging services. Most of those invested in the LJ community are not using it because it's a simpler tool to use - they're not even comparing it to other blogging tools. They don't care. They care about the community of friends that they have on LJ and nowhere else.

And you're right - they will stay. That doesn't mean that they won't be affected by this. And it doesn't mean that i'm happy about it. I think that mainstream legitimacy will be the worst thing for LJ in the long run.

I'm rather new to regularly using LJ myself as a blogging tool; I got my account to read friends' access-protected personal journals. This does not mean that I'm not worried about what may happen to LJ culture and community once this merger goes through.

Back in the wild and crazy late 1990s, I was a community leader at GeoCities; for all we were essentially working at building community in exchange for free webspace, it actually did work for a time. (Much like, apparently, the LJ Support and Abuse volunteers.) After Yahoo bought GeoCities, we felt that the community aspects of the site and the entire culture based around free homepages really changed. Eventually, the program was eliminated, along with a lot of other things that made GeoCities a unique community, like the whole "neighborhood" structure.

I don't like the idea of LiveJournal becoming another GeoCities.

wouldn't this go against the LJ social contract?

Our Promise to You

We at LiveJournal try to ensure that our service is as pleasant as possible for each user, so we've assembled a list of promises we will keep.

We stand firm in saying that we will:

Work with the community, for the community

We promise to keep you informed of changes to the best of our abilities without being intrusive. We promise to run our business based on feedback from the LiveJournal community, and with the LiveJournal community's best interests in mind.
...

I would argue this isn't in the best interests of the community, but i guess that really depends on who you talk to.

PS you might be interested in an article I recently had published on LJ versus blogs (among other things) in First Monday: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_12/raynes/index.html

I, too found that LJ is really "ghettoized" in the academic community.

At first, I was a bit offended by your comment that "It doesn't require a brain to know that buying Live Journal would be a brilliant move on Six Apart's part", because I just posted some negative commentary about it on my site. But then, you proceeded to list all the reasons why you don't like it, and since I consider you to be pretty brilliant, I'm thinking that maybe this deal isn't so brilliant. If all these things are true (you have much deeper insight into the LJ culture than I do... I don't like it from a business perspective), then why is this such a great deal? If LJ users leave in droves, bash Six Apart, and create havoc, how much value will be left for Six Apart? I think your gut reaction to it is much more relevent than your business evaluation.

There is also a potential clash between developer cultures to watch out for.

Since basically none of the details are really known, isn't alot of this just fueled by fears of what either company will become ? and aren't these fears unfounded, really ?

I mean seriously, both companies have taken a great deal of care about their respective users/communities...we're not talking microsoft here. In almost every mention of 6A and LJ in the blogosphere by the academics, pundits, etc, they (both the sites, and their operators) are held in high regard.

I feel like any meta-arguments about intentions or fears with regards to either company trying to go 'mainstream' sound like the familiar rumblings of your local vinyl/music snob going on about how Echo and the Bunnymen lost their cred when they started playing clubs that hold more than 15 people. That is, silly.

I say good for 6A, and good for LJ. Neither have any history of 'selling out' their communities, and for those folks who might fear it, I suggest re-reading Egger's article on 'selling out':

http://www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html

Thanks mike. I was reading through these comments with a great deal of disappointment and frustration until I reached yours where you nailed it.

This is currently rumor. If it is true we know NOTHING about the details of the deals or the plan going forward. Any fears or criticisms or judgment are completely premature and unnecessary.

(BTW Danah: Comparing LJ to MT is not the right comparison when TypePad is closer, though sill not the same as you pointed out. I'm not arguing that community is not LJ's strongest asset.)

I simple don't understand why Six Aprt is regarded as evil and completely incompetent (yes, they have made some welll publicized mistakes) that some many would rush to judgment that a deal (if true) will be a disaster.

I also don't understand were this idea that a something popular must remain free to thrive as a community and anything else is bad or disruptive in a negative. Of course the community will be effected, but isn't this type of significant event part of a culture evolution and lifecycle?

There is a lot of talk about social software in terms of user behavior, but how does the group defended themselves from their finanical burden of their own popularity? That would be a much more constructive and germane discussion then all of this gossip and fear mongering to what may or may not happen. (Were's Clay Shirky when you need him? He was an economist right?)

While LJ is undoubtably a culture with some interesting social dynamics it is still a business. Developers have to eat. They have staff, they need servers and bandwidth and with that number of users a lot of them. As Om Malik pointed out in his post, LJ has 6.5 million users most of whom ARE NOT paying customers. 6.5 million users is A LOT of people to take care of even if you had they had a steady stream of income to work with. I know they get donations and all, but I would be shocked to learn it is enough to meet their ongoing operational expenses. If this is indeed true I would guess the financial and operational resources Six Apart would bring would be the motivation. Depending on the state of their finances and the cost of their operations this may be the best means for the communities survival. We almost lost Blogger which was dying under the crushing weight of its popularity unitl Google saved it.

<tim/>

I actually left my MT-based blog when 6A first started charging for upgrades; I would have been more than happy to pay for the product, but the amount they asked for what I used it for was absolutely exorbitant, especially compared to LJ. The value just was not there for me; LJ offered the community, the support, and the features I wanted and needed for my online endeavors.

It's not that I don't have the guts to install and run MT. I have, and I did, for several years. What I perceived as 6A's inattention to their target audience and their users made me leave, and I haven't looked back.

"I say good for 6A, and good for LJ. Neither have any history of 'selling out' their communities..."

Mike is historically correct, and hopefully a prophet. With the astonishing, yet probably conservative, blogging numbers that Pew announced Monday, 6A can afford to leave LJ as a separate community and have it evolve into a more direct competitor to MySpace. An intimate view into media authoring and consumption that innovative will let them evolve their mainstream/commercial/?adult? offerings in a lot more valuable way than if they try and smash all the properties together into a generic platform.

I didn't even know this 6 Apart site at all, not being a part of the generalized blogging community. But personally, as long as livejournal remained the same after this merger, I wouldn't care. Of course, if, like often happens to free services when they get bought up by larger companies, freedoms started to get cut, *then* I'd get annoyed. But why should I care who owns the thing?

Rumors aside, this is one of the best encapsulations of LJ culture I've read in the outside world. I have to say that neither I nor [most of] my LJfriends are teen/subculture types, but the truth remains that LJ is all about community -- whatever your style or interests, there are a lot of people there that share them, and the social network makes it easy to find them.

I've installed MovableType and WordPress and run blogs with them. It still feels very lonely compared to LiveJournal. Blogging is a soapbox, a place to rant to the world. It's too disconnected and too open (no friends-only posts) to be a place I feel comfortable in for anything but dry technical punditry.

Honestly, what I really wish is that blogging would evolve some of LJ's community structure. I'm all for distributed, non-monolithic solutions. But we'd need a federated identity system and efficient notification protocols. I'm not holding my breath, especially after watching how it's taken years and years to do things that are much simpler (like coming up with a goddamn syndication format that's slightly less broken than RSS.)

On the other hand, if SixApart could design their own identity and notification stuff, modeled on LJ's feature set, and push it into MT, that could be really wicked. (They're already making a start on it with TypeKey.) Sure, people whine about it being proprietary, but at least something would get done.

Not being a LJer, I can't comment on what the community is like.

But as for change in an online community, I do know a bit.

The rule to remember is that Everything Changes. Things do not remain the same. Rules, tools, people, logos, owners, colors and ideas all change. Accept this or your will be constantly disappointed.

As one of the pre-www internet geeks, I remember with great dismay feeling that when AOL established access to the usenet, the internet was going to be 'over'. It wasn't over, it just changed.

Change to online communities is a constant process. MMORPGs from 1997 are nothing like the MMORPGs of today. Is this good thing or a bad thing? It's neither, it simply is the current state.

Even if LJ doesn't get bought today, it most assuredly will not be the same LJ a year from now. And there will be people angry that LJ2004 was better than LJ2006. Just as there are people angry that Ultima Online 1997 was better than Ultima Online 2005.

If the LJ community cannot handle change, they will suffer.

Even before reading this rumor, I was walking home thinking about livejournal's recent news post about how there would probably be six million members by the end of the year. Mainly, I was wondering how the community would sustain itself in the face of that kind of (post-invite code) growth. I guess I thought about in terms of how
many degrees of Brad before people stop thinking of it as a community (because this is how I tended to think about it) and start viewing LJ as a service. From your comments, it seems like this isn't how most users think about it, yet they still see it as something different from a 'blog service.

Like Ario, I kind of cringe when I see how the mainstream regards LiveJournal. But I'm more than willing to trade a little uninformed sneering for a larger community and a superior feature set (for what I want -- the comment system and friendslist are, I think, the key to the community).

You raise the question about whether users care about Brad (there are several "we love brad" communities, and lots of people comment on "news" and "maintenance" posts which might signify something), but I think it's interesting to think about how Brad feels about members. While many users might think of him as a benevolent dictator, I get the sense that he might think of them as a not-too-troublesome source of interesting [mostly open-source] programming challenges that have resulted in some neat things that haven't gotten a lot of attention. I mean, the world was swooning over kinja which is basically rss syndication + friends page.

After all of this rambling, I share your feelings that the merger would be a "bad thing" and am choosing not to believe them for the time being. I'm pretending that Brad & co. still like their independence and aren't ready to hand it off to someone else. And I'm treating the absence of a public "heh" post or comment to deny the rumor as a sign that working on load balancing was more interesting.

Jens in particular summarized some of the points I wanted to make about Livejournal. Michael, I don't think danah's arguing that LJ should be static or that their users can't handle change, but that Moveable Type, though also a good service, has such a different user-base that the changes they may make to LJ would be more in the interests of the MT community (which they understand well and probably have more interest in) than the LJ community. Nicole explained above how the changes Yahoo made to Geocities killed its community, and I'd hate to see something similar happen on LJ.

A property of Livejournal that I find intriguing is the number of empty or near-empty blogs on it. These folks sign up because their more active friends want them to read posts regularly and have access to the protected ones. As Airo and Josh also said, certainly my friends and I signed up on LJ because of the community features, and I have several friends who have empty blogs and just use their friends page. Several friends with MT blogs have two accounts on LJ - one syndicating their MT blog, and one from which to comment and sometimes post private entries. I'm not very familiar with the MT community, so I'll refrain from making comparisons since they would be one-sided.

Aside: danah, have you found many who see having a paid account as a status symbol? We're probably at the geeky extreme on LJ, but in my circle of friends, people used to pay for their accounts because they wanted to syndicate more than two outside blogs, back when LJ had the syndication point system. Currently, they often want to add new syndicated accounts, get rid of the LJ look with customized layouts, scrape their LJ posts to put on their homepage, or just support a good service. We don't look at each other's user information pages very often and so aren't likely to see how many of our friends have paid accounts.

(Also, you got a few responses on your syndicated account on LJ.)

There are definitely folks who pay for features and syndication is an example amongst the geeks but the percentage of people who use syndication on LJ is quite small. And yes, i have found the status issue among mostly younger LJers.

By no means do i believe that Six Apart is evil - quite the opposite. I think they are a great company, but they have an *entirely* different set of cultural practices than LiveJournal and i don't believe that the two can merge without bloodshed. I do believe that the users of both services have great disdain for many of the users of the others. LJers don't give a rats ass about most MT/T bloggers and most MT/T bloggers think that LJers are childish.

I also don't think that LJ is dying.

timothy: actually, LJ only has about 2.5 million "active" accounts, out of 5.5 million accounts ever created. of those, the VAST majority are non-paying accounts - around 90,000 currently have paid status, but the statistics don't tell us how many of those bought the full year, the six months, or the two months package.

and scott, yes. to quote from an entry i wrote earlier: "essentially: make minor improvements on what already exists, but don't try to force lj to be something it's not. i hate the whole 'if you want to control something, buy it' attitude, and i'm hoping brad really has found the right people to pass along the care of his baby to." and whom will respect the social contract - avoiding advertisements on users' journals, even the non-paying ones; supporting open-source; and not heightening the digital divide between paying and non-paying customers by only offering support to paying customers. (the fact that typepad apparently requires a subscription fee of $5/month after a trial and thus has no long-term free users irks me, as that's double the cost for a paid account with LJ, whose pricing was established years before typepad's and hasn't changed in the years since.) a similar suggestion - to offer better support to paying customers - once came up on LJ, and was promptly shot down - because a decent portion of the people doing the volunteer work in the support area pay the site through their time dedicated to it, and not necessarily with $. and stratifying users so would hurt the community feel.

i, too, would be happy to see livejournal around in 50 years ...

" I do believe that the users of both services have great disdain for many of the users of the others. LJers don't give a rats ass about most MT/T bloggers and most MT/T bloggers think that LJers are childish."

What is this high school? This sounds like the cheerleaders talking about the chess club. "I'm not sitting in the same class as them they're like so not happening and uncool."

I would consider myself a pretty major user and member of the MT community and I've never met anyone who spoke that badly of LJ other then to say -- its not a good fit for me.

Much (all?) of the software on which LJ runs has been open-sourced. There are, in fact, LJ clones out there like DeadJournal and GreatestJournal.

So a buyout scenario nobody's mentioned yet that nonetheless strikes me as very probable is a repeat of the exodus from Movable Type to WordPress... the LJers defect to a similar system.

It'd be complicated because of the whole "community" thing, but if enough of the well-connected make the leap, plenty will follow.

Hopefully, after such a move, LJ can benefit from 6A's expertise in interface design, and 6A from LJ's experience in clueful social design.

Like danah, I don't think LJ needs any sort of improvement in legitimacy. I hope the presence of 6A won't be felt by the average LiveJournaler, so that the unique culture they have there is not upset by the change. Come to think of it, if I were Ben or Mena I'd concentrate on importing the good ideas rather than messing with the natives too much.

They [People who use LJ] mock bloggers who want to be pundits, journalists, experts. In essence, they mock the culture of bloggers that use Six Apart's tools. During interviews with LJ/Xanga folks, i've been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard.

There are LJ-ers of all sorts of opinions. Personally, i read a lot of pseudo-professional blogs when i have the time, and i find them very valuable. And i know i'm not the only LJ user who feels this way. (Hell, you're writing this very screed on a non-LJ blog, despite saying "i adore LJ from the bottom of my heart.")

While you cannot generalize about LJers, a vast majority of them are engaged in acts of resistance regularly (think: subcultures, activists, youth rebels, etc.). They value LJ because it values them. They value LJ because it is a tool of resistance, an act of going against mainstream and representing those already marginalized by society - the geeks, freaks and queers among us. They don't want to be mainstream. They don't want their parents/authorities/oppressors using the same service. At the same time, LJ provides shelter, support, community. When someone threatens to commit suicide, LJ doesn't throw up its hand and scream "not my problem." There are folks who actually work to help friends help each other. They're not just an anonymous service - they care.

Despite being an actual LJ user, i'm not going to attempt to speak for any sort of "majority" of LJ-ers or even to speak for the ones i regularly interact with. But to speak for myself, i do not use LJ because it is "subversive." I use it because it allows me to easily keep people updated on my life and to kepe updated on the lives of others; i like the ease of the friendslist feature (though the terminology is problematic). I like the huge amounts of information i can tap through the usage of communities and asking friends (who then ask their friends, and on it goes). I am 21 years old and my parents read my LJ, which contains such "subversive" or "resistant" things as fanfiction and political opinions and religious musings that do not always agree with those of my parents or of some of my friends. In fact, one major reason i got an LJ midway through my first year at college was so that i could easily keep my parents updated as to what was going on in my life. While i don't "friendslock" any of my entries, i really appreciate the existence of those privacy features, and think they are one thing that makes LiveJournal superior to other blogging services. I also like the way that LJ threads comments and e-mails replies -- something that most if not all other blogging services (save those that use LJ's open source, such as DeadJournal and GreatestJournal) lack. I adore the communities i have found on LJ and the way that LJ facilitates the formation of such communities. While many of my communities may in fact be "subversive," that is now why i am doing this.

I would love to know why people donate to LiveJournal. My hunch is that it has to do with cultural identity. When you donate, it says so on your page. When you donate, you signify that you value LJ. Forget increased features, you've just made the ultimate commitment to a community - a commitment of money. And aren't you jealous of the permanent members and early adopters?

Again, i won't speak for anyone else, but honestly, i want those extra features. I've gotten addicted to having a plethora of icons to attach to posts/comments. I like being able to create polls. I do like knowing that i'm helping keep the service alive and growing, but i only think of that when someone mentions it. When i get a notice saying that my paid time is going to run out soon, my decision about whether or not to pull out my debit card is influenced by how attached i am to the services that payment will provide me with, not about making a tangible commitment to a community facilitator.

One of the big features a community site like LJ offers is friends-only posts. There are huge numbers of friends-only journals, people have large amounts of social capital invested in LJ because of this feature. Let's face it, being able to bitch about people behind their backs, online, is just what every teen needs. Moving to another service requires getting your entire social group to move with you, a huge undertaking, so they're pretty much captive. In other words, even moderate amounts of fucking over the LJ feel would not produce huge defections.

As a user of LiveJournal and TypePad, I hope there is some truth to the rumor. Seb states it well, as there are great features to both sites/services. The desire to have more control (with design and categorization) led me to TypePad, but that site sits quietly, while discussion remains quite buoyant on LJ.

I'm trying to understand the business case here. Instant community seems questionable. Perhaps MT would begin some clarification between selling "TypePad" for blogs and a "LiveJournal" product for journals. Distinct markets, with different needs.

Conjecture, but more fun than "weird" as some put it.

UrsaMajor: Thanks for clarifying those numbers. 2.5 million users is still a lot of servers, bandwidth, support and maintenance.

I think your expectations are not balanced out with the realization that both of the organizations are businesses that you are bound to be disappointed.

Businesses exist to produce profit. Forgetting this very basic tenant is precisely how so many Internet companies imploded a few years ago and a few others (Blogger) barely made it out alive. If it does not help them profit then they shouldn't do it.

Could we all give them the benefit of the doubt that they have some idea of what they are doing? I trust that they would not make any changes to an aquisition that will lose customers or gut their investment, but they will make them to make/maintain/grow its profitability.

Keep in mind that, while many still interchange "Six Apart" with "Ben and Mena", the company has become much much bigger then just the two of them and that they have some extremely successfully and knowledgable business people on board in some capacity -- Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, Barak Berkowitz, Andrew Anker to name a few.

I just can't help but feel like this is going to be like when AMF bought Harley Davidson. I don't think there was any demonstrable decline in Harley quality during that period, but Harley users just didn't feel right about being owned by a big corporate conglomerate. Granted, Six Apart is by no means big, nor "corporate" nor a conglomerate, but still, I think just the idea that LJ isn't independent is going to send a lot of people packing, even if there are no service and pricing chances.

The other thing is that I never really thought of this as a "fight" for market share. The whole market is growing tremendously, and Typepad/MT, Blogger, and LiveJournal each have their own distinct niches. (I'm sorry, I just can't take "MSN Spaces" seriously.) It didn't occur to me that Six Apart would "need" something to be viable or be a player "against" Blogger. Can't we all just get along? This would be more fun if we were all ganging up on Microsoft.

The one thing I will concede is that there are some very smart people at Six Apart... and moreover... good people. I mean, the firm was started by high school sweethearts and backed by a VC that can recite the Princess Bride off the top of his head. I don't think they're interested in recking anything that the LJ community has worked so hard to create. All of our commentary is just thinking out loud and I think we're all just standing outside like in that silly AOL commercial in droves waiting to hear what the two companies have to say. Uncertainty definately breeds fear... I just hope they can pull this off in a way that makes everyone happy... that we look back on this five years as a red letter day for the medium and for both companies.

What many people are forgetting here is that LJ users (of which I have been one for many years - paid user on one account, free on my other idents and communities I manage) is *not* about blogging or the tools available, it is *only* about the social interaction. Amongst my friends (many of whom I first me on LJ and the rest were introduced to LJ by me) it is used to create our lives, organise our lives and relationships. This isn't blogging for the readers in some nebulous 'out there' but those 'in here'. And if we lose trust in the self-control of those online lives then we'll take the Open Sourced software and go looking for new hosting so that we can carry on ignoring the technical tools and get on with our lives.

Oh yes, I'm 48 and my LJ friends are between 20 and 60 and include all those sub-cultures that get mentioned. That non-mainsteam enough for you?

I'll inject my perspective, though with the caveat that yes, this is in fact still rumor and the reality is that none of us knows what effects either end of the transaction will have on the other.

I hopped on board with LJ at its infancy, early 2000. For the next two and a half years, that journal became a great many things to me, and to the people who read and participated in it: a diary, a photo album, a discussion community, a coffee house, a political podium, an 'adult pajama party', a battlefield, a groovy, crowded bar, a virtual classroom.

You're right - the community and culture of LiveJournal is unmatched. And this part of it was the first thing I missed when I switched to MT back in early 2003.

I made the move because my journal had evolved into not a private, separate space from my life -- but as a strong part of it. And I had a website that delivered some of that (www.adventurejournalist.com), and felt the journal should be included, not kept separately.

It's worked for me. While I miss the community and back-and-forth of LJ conversations, I also greatly value the full customization and integration and 'tweak-ability' and seamlessness of using MT. I, like others here, am unsure why SixApart is getting such a bad rap in this case. Boil it down, and both LiveJournal and MT were born of very ordinary people with extraordinary talent and vision. Both platforms are legitimate, and both provide space that serves its population, even if they do so differently.

If indeed SixApart should purchase LiveJournal, I do hope that they'll leave both platforms relatively intact, and rather than changing everything on a group of millions (as I told a friend this morning, I really don't believe LJers would 'go quietly into the night' with any old change 6A wanted to make) --- I hope they instead choose to take the strengths of both platforms and interchange them. Bring the feel of LJ community and conversation thread to MT and Typepad, and bring the customization and integrative freedom of those, to LiveJournal.

Every good company evolves. Change is inevitable in a dynamic market. We can only ask that those changes reflect the best interests and growth potential of its customer base.

VampWillow - i think we're on the same page actually. The only difference is that my definition of blogging encompasses the practices you're referring to which is why it might be confusing.

(Apologies if this is in prior comments; I skimmed them but there's a lot to wade through.)

Keeping a site like LJ running requires an investment of both time and effort. I wouldn't be surprised if Brad would like to spend more time thinking about new features, and less time load balancing the database servers--not to mention managing the staff. Selling LJ is one way to get more resources and some management support.

I'm inclined to make a comparison with Slashdot: it also has a community aspect, though of a different kind, and was also sold off to a sympathetic but decidedly commercial parent. Now, the quality of commentary on Slashdot is (IMO) very low these days, but I think that decline started well before the acquisition. The main function of Slashdot seems to have survived: people submit interesting stories, and it's still a good place to check the pulse of the tech-geek world.

If this acquisition actually happens, I'm curious to see what the revenue model will be afterwards. There used to be some real benefits to paid accounts (e.g. use of faster servers), but those have become smaller. I thought it was interesting that you chose to call them "donations"; it *is* very close to that. Once LJ is owned by a bigger parent, will I still be inclined to support them?

same page? yes, we probably are. But I suspect many others (including those who are seeing $£€ in their eyes at this idea) are forgetting that fact. I've been in the computing biz since 1971 and have plenty of other options I could explore if I wanted to be concerned with the minutiae of coding my own blog from scratch (btdtgtts!) or with some tool like MT (again btdtgtts) but I don't as what I want is to *comunicate* with my friends not behave like I've got a personal newsletter. As Tonya has noted, change *is* inevitable. The question must always be though whether that change is for the better of the many or the better for the few ...

An interesting take on the differences between bloggers and LJers. I think you may be overstating the 'rebellious teen' theme, though.

I gave money to LJ because I wanted more user icons, first and foremost; I'm an artist, most of my icons are from my own art, and the choice of icon is often part of the message - especially in commenting. But I did also give them money to keep them around - it became a part of my life, a way of examining myself and of keeping up with friends. I wanted to do a little to make sure they'd still be around.

I don't value LJ as a tool of resistance, despite being a marginalized part of society (artist, transsexual, queer). It's connected me with interesting new friends who have similar issues, but I don't think of LJ as anything political, as any kind of tool. It's a substrate for discussion. An endless array of BBSs where there's no "on topic" flames to be had. I see frothing Jesus-freak rightwingers on LJ. I see teens speaking to their friends.

I see LJ as a hell of a lot of people, who have all these little communities and networks. Some are quite alien to me. Some are dear to me. LJ is the medium I encounter them through. There isn't any one LiveJournal community; there's a ton of overlapping communities on LJ.

I've played with Movable Type. The only things it has that I vaguely desire as a user are categories and plugins. I don't see 6A having any technology to offer to LJ. Just cash money. And maybe a chance for Brad to hand LJ off to someone else; he's been working on it since 1999, and maybe he's getting tired.

but you've got this posted on MT - where's yo LJ?

It's official: Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal!

I think it's really hard to characterize the entire LJ population or speak for them - beyond saying it's about community and friends.

It sounds like everything is going to stay distinct and intact. Bloodshed between SA and LJ -- that's a wee bit dramatic don't you think?

True, *some* bloggers and LJers make fun of the other team, which is silly but harmless. There are also a growing number of people who have both a blog and an LJ. I also really love LJ and it's many little communities - it's totally amazing. An LJ friend of mine setup an LJ syndication of Blogumentary, and I feel like I have a little bridge to their magical world.

I think it's good to be concerned for those subcultures too, but like someone else said - if they *choose* to let it bother them, this invisible Six Apart oppressive force that probably won't actually affect anything they do - they can *choose* to join one of the other LJ-like communities. And that might be a good thing, to branch off and to their own thing on a smaller more independent scale.

By the way, I don't mean to sound demeaning when I say "little communities". :-) Since LJ is actually one huge frigging community but made of many smaller cozy communities.

Your and LJ's blanket black-n-white characterizations about bloggers shows to me insecurity around your own little turf. What it shows me is that you don't have a clue about the power that blogging is having on the mainstream press. Blogging is a radical democratization of a persons ability to publish. Never in history as such a thing ever been as powerful or as possible as it is today with blogging. I could list hundreds blogs that totall cutting edge, radical, and subsculture. Better than LJ's Blogs are inclusive. Jorunals are not. Your "we are here, and you can't come" is exactlt what is wrong with Journaling and why it will not last. Bullshit exclusivity and elitism needs to die, so perhaps MT's move is a good thing. Not for your little turf however.

"During interviews with LJ/Xanga folks, i've been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard." Excuse me? Talk about generalizations.

As an MT user, just wanted to drop by and report that I have friends, a life away from blogging, I try not to try too hard, and don't really enjoy talking to be heard. It's amusing to read that LJers mock bloggers as "people who just talk to be heard" But no LJ'er talks just to be heard, either? Good grief.

For me, the whole idea of mocking bloggers, or any other group of a similar ilk, is a waste of energy and attention. I have an LJ friend, and I comment on her site, and she comments on my blog. We even go for coffee sometimes, and haven't yet come to blows.

What's to be gained from Live Journallers mocking Moveable Typists? A sense of trendoid superiority? Again, it's a waste of time and energy.

I wasn't aware that if you donate to LJ, it sez so on your LJ page. I agree that this suggests that the donor values her or his commitment to the LJ community. Why would broadcasting this be necessarily important? I've contributed to MT, but this information isn't available on my site.

"Movable Type is a product; LiveJournal is a community. Six Apart is seen as a community that provides tools, not culture." Um, say what? Both are products, and both can be used to create community. But again, I wonder, why is the distinction so critical? I am a blogger who has nothing bad to say about LJ, and has never spoken of it with disdain. Again, what a waste of time, energy and brain cells. It's picking fights for the sake of picking fights.

I appreciate what you have said, and hope that your worst fears about this apparent impending acquisition are not realized.

I never feel lonely with my blog. I don't write it for anyone in particular. I've made friends in the blog world, such as Tonya, who responded above. There is a critical mass I've reached regarding how many blogs I can view, and even among that number, I can't keep up. Within those blogs, I have community. Oh, and I have a life away from my computer screen that keeps me unbelievably busy.

I hope, sincerely, that LiveJournal survives, without any bloodshed whatsoever.

On one hand I do think your comments about how LJers see blogging is a gross over-generalization, as is commenting that LJ is so heavily "sub-culture" and underground. In point of fact, LJ can be rather full at times (or seem so) of people who are vocally anti-sub-anything and anti-hippie and anti-whatever. From the outside, mirroring your idea of how LJers see blogging, bloggers and the mainstream seem to have a tendency to see LJ as angsty teens looking for exclusive communites to get attention from and "drama". However, the comments by the aggressive Mr. Taylor are equally extreme in the opposite direction. Bullshit elitism? This is a cry I hear from many self-styled pundits - frequently young - that is always rather nebulous. Elite about what, exactly? The ability to have some measure of privacy while still performing a degree of publication? (Let's call it limited scope publication.) Mr. Taylor sounds as if he is laboring under a false dichotomy that blogging and LJ are in some sort of competition for the elegatarian future or something. Err, no. How about they're just different entities that have different parameters despite a superficial resembalance? (Mr. Taylor himself could be interpreted as sounding insecure - he might want to calm down and realize that it seems rather innaccurate to say LJ users in general have much of an opinion of blogging at all.)

I feel there is really a difference between LJ and the blogging world, but it is somewhat more muddled. It's still very definite in spite of that. Just not easy to conceptualize simply.

So LJ has updated their TOS, which Brad refers to as being basically no different. There's one change in there that I can't figure out, though: the terms used to mention a "security policy", and now they don't:

Old TOS:

XV Journal Content
4. LiveJournal.com reserves the right, without limitation except by law, to serve user Content on the web according to the security provisions set forth by the author. LiveJournal.com also reserves the right, without limitation, to resell any portion of a user's LiveJournal back to that individual;

New TOS:

XIV Journal Content
4. LiveJournal.com reserves the right, without limitation except by law, to serve any user Content on the web, through the downloadable clients and otherwise. LiveJournal.com also reserves the right, without limitation, to resell any portion of a user's LiveJournal back to that individual;

My gut feeling is that this change is in the same vein as the new NO WARRANTY section of the terms, that is, to say they're not liable for breaches. But it seems odd that there's now no mention of the security policy. I'd be curious to know what the real reason for the change is.

I would love to know why people donate to LiveJournal. My hunch is that it has to do with cultural identity. When you donate, it says so on your page. When you donate, you signify that you value LJ. Forget increased features, you've just made the ultimate commitment to a community - a commitment of money.

There's also the anonymous gifting of LJ friends for more LJ time and other paid user perks that illustrates this idea of LJ as a community. That probably doesn't happen a lot anywhere else.

There are a number of distinct differences between the various journalling/blogging sites and services available, but one thing that does strike me about LJ is this teen-angst element highlighted by other comments here. I don't see that as a problem at all, but I do suspect that one thing that causes discomfort about LJ is its popularity amongst young women. I think of LJ as a quite feminised space in its way, whereas MT/Typepad seem very masculine on the whole, both in content and appearance, as do many others. There's more tinkering about under the hood on offer. More professionalism and less anarchy.

I'm 38, a man, and started a journal at LJ two years ago purely because I came across it by chance when looking for information on a web cartoonist, Patrick Farley, who has a journal there. It was easy to set up and get writing, I didn't pay much attention to the nature of the LJ versus any other services. Over time, I've grown to like it more than similar services on offer. It's not so serious (or it's as serious as you choose it to be), I don't have any belief that my journal should somehow be shouting to the world and clamouring for attention. I don't think my opinions on this or that are desparately needed or sought. It's just a way for me to write on a frequent basis. Along the way I've met some intriguing characters and found some excellent journals. I've found a lot of chaff too, but so what? It's like going through a used bookshop. Anything might be there and it frequently is. And there are young people there? With all their complications, idealism and self-absorption? Perish the thought that we should allow these people a voice of any sort. Especially these girls with all their problems... LJ is frequently hysterical. Good! I say. Is web publishing some sort of private gentleman's club?

I'd agree with Jason Taylor's comment above, if I understand him, that it's frustrating at times to find that journals are friends-only. Mine isn't and almost all that I visit aren't either. I don't see how that is "you can't come" though. And, frankly, I couldn't a monkey's about influencing the mainstream press, as much as I recognise the achievements of others in that endeavour.

I'm a bit confused about your post;

"While you cannot generalize about LJers..."

You appear in your post to generalize about bloggers having no friends, and mostly being lone kooks screaming on the street corner for attention. Contrasting this against a LiveJournal love fest where everyone cares about everyone, and they're all there for the good of society as a whole.

That's a bit intellectually dishonest, no? LJ has good and bad, as does blogging. The big difference is that with LJ the community infrastructure is already there - you don't need to dig sewer lines and hook up the electrical - it's done for you. With blogging, you setup your software, and then you have to build your own exit ramp and access road to get people to come to you. The tools are different, but the people aren't. There are as many lonely crazies on LJ as there are on TypePad or Blogger or MSN Spaces or ANYWHERE.

It's the bloggers who are influencing the mainstream press? Then tell them to stop it!

"i've been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard"

Similar things can be, and have been, said about LiveJournal. You know, people with no real friends trying too hard for popularity, vying for people to add them as a friend, for personal validation.
I'm sure both things could be true of some, or even many, of MT or LJ users.

Mind you, I'm in complete agreement that there are often major differences between other general bloggers, and LiveJournals. Even their comment threads often seem to be a different animal somehow.

It'd be interesting to know why that is.

But if someone says it's because of youth culture... you have people claiming LJ is not youth dominated.
And then people mention "oppressed groups"... and I have no clue who they're talking about. Does anyone know the specifics about these oppressed groups of people who use LJ, who they are, and how LJ is working for them?

"For example, what's the best way to handle an LJ community dedicated to cutters trying to outdo each other via images?"

Isn't that kind of thing hands-off on LJ? I think it's hands off on the internet, generally. I mean, LiveJournal, nor any other tool owner or even community owner, or any other individual, has any legal responsibility to police the mental health of their users, so far as I know, unless it involves actual law-breaking, right?

There's a difference between hands-off and actually doing what's necessary when things go wrong. I have the UTMOST respect for the abuse/support people at LJ for knowing what to do in suicide situations, when people are hurting themselves, etc. Sooo much respect.

"There's a difference between hands-off and actually doing what's necessary when things go wrong."

What do you mean by this?
I mean, that seems self-evident, no? Of course there's a difference between hands-off and doing something...

But what do you mean "doing what's necessary" ? What is necessary? Are you saying it's necessary for LJ abuse/support people to intervene in, as you said, a "cutters photo competition" or whatever?

And what do LJ abuse/support people do in these situations?
If they do anything beyond what's required by law, then yes, that's definitely NOT hands-off.
But I was always under the impression that LiveJournal WAS hands-off - in that LiveJournalers were definitely not policed on these things (other than where it's required by law).

So I'm still not clear on what you mean.

They do not police, but they have been known to intervene to prevent suicides and get people help when necessary.

I get what you are saying, but Live Journal, Six Apart, they are businesses and they are here for money. As for it's users you may say Live Journal is for Cultured users and Movable Type is for people with no friends. I say Live Journal is for amateurs who can't setup a blog and MT users are people who are taking the plunge at being their own publishers and learning more than that.

This isn't an argument I want to start, but embrace change and see where it goes, if you want a culture start your own, and see what happens when you get offered money

"They do not police, but they have been known to intervene to prevent suicides and get people help when necessary."

I'm still unclear about the "when necessary" part, and who, exactly, is doing this intervening?

"I say Live Journal is for amateurs who can't setup a blog and MT users are people who are taking the plunge at being their own publishers and learning more than that."

Oh that's definitely got to be the major reason LJ developed quickly early on. Nowadays, I don't know if that's the main reason someone chooses LiveJournal. It's certainly not the only reason someone would choose LiveJournal over other services which offer no fuss & remote hosting nowadays.

LJ folks will gain a cleaner product. Yes, that's right, mom is coming and she is going to totally wail on LJ to clean it's damn room before dad comes home and breaks out the belt.

I _cannot wait_.

Brad is a tech. He sucks at business management and personal leadership. (I used to be an LJ support volunteer, I'm allowed to say that.)

6A gets backend technology that can support 6 million user accounts (probably 3 million actual users). LJ gets to be managed by people who understand business management. Brad gets a job as 6A's chief tech. Brad was going to need to sell at some point, unless he managed to recruit a good manager. This is a pretty good outcome.

Based on all these descriptions of LiveJournal culture, I guess I'm not part of it and shouldn't be posting stuff to LiveJournal.

I've never had the slightest disdain or contempt for people who use Six Apart's tools. That's stupid. Why would I have contempt for somebody over what tools they use? (And Six Apart != Movable Type. TypePad is a hosted turnkey product, just like Blogger/Blogspot or, I'd argue, LJ.)

The nice thing about LJ's friends list system is that you can end up in a network with its own little culture that sort of accretes out of the void. It's impossible to generalize about what these are like. Personally, I call my journal a blog most of the time and post the kinds of things to it that are more stereotypical of MT blogs than LiveJournal blogs. I've never seen any pressure for me to emigrate-- except from outsiders who tell me that I need to give up LJ because it's "only for 13-year-old girls".

Sheesh. All this noise. Where does one begin?

It seems to me what is going on is very straightforward. This is the first in what will become a long series of consolidations of blogging/social networking sites. In the end all of them will be consolidated with (or become) search sites as well (Orkut is already part of Google, and MSN has tried to enter into this market as well). What this means is that the data you create is going to be data-mined and used to market products, services, and people's junk on ebay to you. What's more, people will let this happen, because they've already come to expect it, and accept it as "cool".

A revolt of LJ users, or a migration to a new site (DJ?) cannot prevent this. Any site created on the same premises of open access to (even some of) the users' personal data, thoughts, reflections or whatever, will require databases to store that information and such centralized data repositories about people, their preferences, friends and mundane daily lives automatically become information assets that someone will seek to exploit or control.

Everyone needs to understand that the act of creating and maintaining a journal or friends list on any hosted service entails an implicit contract (or look in the legal fine print to find the service's interpretation of this contract) in which you the user lend to the service some small but significant fraction of your social capital. What makes the services valuable, both to users and to marketers is the net aggregation of this social capital. Moreover, in aggregate, it takes on very different and sometimes unrecognizable forms from that in which it was originally lent. Furthermore, having lent this capital, you can't really ever get it back.

Companies like Google understand that they only need to borrow a very small amount of any one user's capital to end up with a very large pool and thereby to become ridiculously wealthy. Users seem not to understand that this is what is going on. In addition, users fail to understand that from the company's point of view, all the information on their servers belongs to them, just as your school or your employer or your ISP "owns" your email, and can open it, read it, alter it, or delete it without your consent or knowledge. I don't personally agree with these policies, but it is the way that things work, and the courts repeatedly have viewed the provenance of information in just this way (one prior precedent is your credit record, which the reporting companies make very hard for any maligned individual to correct).

LJ users may feel or claim a sense of community (and I don't dispute the reality of any such sense or feeling), and this is important to its success, growth and enduring value, especially for the operators of LJ, but this in no way means that the operators see LJ or its value in the same terms as the users. Instead, they are most likely to identify the value as coming from the technologies that they maintain -- without their work, their user support, their backups and maintenance, the value that the users experience would never be captured. These activities are costly, and hence they will need to be able to extract value from the same resources to justify their continued involvement in them.

6A and LJ also have other worries. They are very small companies with very large user bases in a hostile marketplace. In order to survive and continue to do what they do, they will have to carefully pick their way around the MS, Google and Yahoo companies out there, any of which could potentially force a hostile takeover, if they had a good enough reason to want to. And as the user bases grow, and the importance of public blogging and social networking becomes increasingly apparent, and its potential for marketing becomes more and more irresistable, such takeovers become more and more likely. By banding together, 6A and LJ begin to hedge themselves against the most agressive and hostile competition they face, and ensure their longevity for just a little longer. When the big guns come out, it will not be your hides that the operators will be thinking about, so much as their own. People at LJ report that they like the jobs they work in after all; some of the changes they could face personally would be as monstrous to them as what the users might feel.

So the 6A/LJ takeover issue is not so simple as one might initially think, as there are a lot of players in the full caste and some pretty ferocious ones at that. At the same time, the trends driving the merger are fairly plain to see, and we shouldn't be surprised at it hapening or at what its consequences will be. And I don't think that they will be pretty in the long run.

loestrin go to

What's up, guys?

hi guy,
I think it's good to be concerned for those subcultures too, but like someone else said - if they *choose* to let it bother them, this invisible Six Apart oppressive force that probably won't actually affect anything they do - they can *choose* to join one of the other LJ-like communities. And that might be a good thing, to branch off and to their own thing on a smaller more independent scale.