Positioning Livejournal in the blogging/SN marketplace

[matgb]

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.

Comments

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

tee hee

[doingsoso.livejournal.com]

I'm so tired of LJ's lame drama. I can't see the benefit of censoring certain interests from the top 100 interests list. What was the point of that?

They're trying to play two games, one on the front side with their "board" , and another behind the scenes where they don't think anyone will see them.

[cosmolinguist]

When I heard about this I immediately started thinking of you and the magic bag of alternate-platform tricks you were talking about last summer. I hope you do get it back out.

No pressure though. :)