emacsen's journal
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Below are the 2 most recent journal entries recorded in the "emacsen" journal:
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07:43 am
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The sinking ship
As others have pointed out, it feels like LiveJournal is a sinking ship. With the company's "merger" a few years ago now resulting in all the LiveJournal infrastructure moving to Russia, I think we can safely say that the culture of Livejournal has, and will continue to change.
At the same time I and many others have joined Facebook, the ultimate peer pressure application.
It's been suggested that I love my LJ posts to Facebook, but I won't do that, and here's why
Facebook, for all its interesting features, remains in the walled-garden model of applications. It's designed to bring users into the system and keep them there. To that end, they require logins for most functions, do not accept standard like OpenID and in their TOS, claim an unlimited license to any works placed in the system.
You can contrast this with sites like Livejournal. No one needs to be a member of Livejournal to read a feed, and with the addition of OpenID a few years ago, you didn't even need to be a member to post or even read friends-only entries. You don't need to be a member of Flickr to view pictures, and you don't need to use Google to talk to someone on GTalk. All of these are "lock-ins" on Facebook.
Beyond the ethical issues, it's been my experience that walled gardens are intense but short lived. AOL was one the largest walled gardens, pre-Internet, and it lasted about ten years, while MySpace as a phenomenon lasted only three or four years. Walled gardens attempt to provide every application to everyone but ultimately specialized sites like Twitter will come around and offer a better service.
So, if a walled garden is both ethically and practically doomed, what is the solution?
I'm afraid that at this point, I'm at a loss. I certainly could install my own blog engine on my own web servers. This would get me away from the situation with LiveJournal but it wouldn't afford me the same flexibillity either. On LJ I have friend filters. I could implement them using OpenID[1] but then we're once-again limited by the technology. After all, do we expect that every friend of mine will know how to use OpenID and then know to use the special RSS feed?
Until I have answers or until LiveJournal makes a specific move that I feel is threatening or concerning, I'll be sticking put. But I'll still be using ljcharm to back up my entire post history should I need to leave in a hurry.
[1] I'll spare you the gory details about why RSS Auth is a failure and simply say that the solution appears to be "throw out any hope of genuine authentication in favor of "magic feed strings"
Tags: metablogging
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06:52 am
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Audio Updates?
I have a blogging dilema.
I have a lot of ideas I want to share with folks. If I'm talking one on one, I can ususually share those ideas in a few minutes, but writing a blog entry takes time. I usually go thorugh at least two long writing sessions, and edit a few times before posting.
The result is that I have very few posts.
So I've been thinking of a possible solution that I want to float, publically.
I know that there are about five people who read my blog reglularly, and I think about 10-15 who read it on occassion.
What do people think of me doing audio posts about once a week?
Poll #946360 Audio Update?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 6What do you think of audio updates?
Tags: metablogging
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emacsen's journal
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