Happy Monday

It appears from entries on a few posts rad today that some of you are planning to celebrate St Patrick's Day this evening. Um, why? St Patrick's Day was last Saturday. Of course, I care not for such things but I was called upon to settle an argument at the bar last Saturday, one of the regulars was drinking Guinness, which was most out of character—it was explained why, and no one believed her, so I had to look it up online. (ETA: The Beeb site has a longer and better researched article on the same topic it seems)

Apparently they change it every so often as it's not allowed to happen during Holy Week (which has something to do with Eostre this weekend I'm given to understand), so it gets moved every so often. Looks like a bunch of marketeers missed a trick to not run it last Saturday. He was a bit weird anyway, why would you want to banish snakes?

So, y'know, have a very happy Monday anyway.  You might as well eat drink and be merry if you feel like it, why do you need some dead bloke to give you an excuse?

Positioning Livejournal in the blogging/SN marketplace

Interesting comment made at minnesattva's:

The sensible thing to do would be to differentiate LJ, position it if you like as an 'intellectual networking site', or the equivalent of a collaborative newspaper (it has news, opinion, cartoons...) - something you *read* (or write) rather than something you play at. You could even have a default set of people who would be added as your 'friends' when you started on LJ representing some of the best/most popular writing on here - people like say bradhicks or theyorkshergob who don't write about themselves on their journals much but write about actual *stuff*, but who you could then add or subtract at will...

Can't say I disagree with that at all, and am amused at the two choices given as examples. I have, naturally, got a whole passel of posts in my head on the whole SUP buyout/ending-of-Basic/interest not-really-censorship thing, but, y'know, lack of motivation strikes again. I do think ending Basic accounts is a daft idea, and I thinkt he way it wasn't clearly announced was insanely stupid.

SUP appear to want to treat LJ as a Social Network, not a blogging platform with SN elements, which I think is completely the wrong way to go, especially given the Russian market success where blogging means LJ. Ah well.

Possibility my long-on-hiatus alternate platform collection of ideas might get dug out again soon. Possibly.