Notes on blogging

[starlady]

Scheduled posting cannot come soon enough as far as I'm concerned, IJS.

In the meantime, skud has an interesting post, Ebook discussions flying under the radar, which graphically dissects the discussion, mostly on LJ and DW, of which my post Some links on illegal file-sharing and IPR was a small part:

...my gut feeling was correct: there was a really fascinating, complicated, crunchy conversation going on, mostly among women, mostly on LJ/DW, that the tech blogs and other parts of the web don’t seem to have noticed. Make of that what you will.

Personally, while there may be an extent to which the insular grammar of LJ/DW contributes to our insularity vis-a-vis the rest of the web, I'm sure that's only part of it. Food for thought, most definitely.

Comments

[boundbooks]

Hm. If I had to describe the ecology of LJ/DW, I'd have to go with 'dense and insular.' I think that due to the nature of following/friending and userids for comments that automatically go back to journals/blogs, conversations on LJ/DW tend to be fast, cross-referential, and archival-based.

I think that's part of the reason that linkspam posts are so popular; it's very, very hard to follow what's going on in LJ/DW even in our tiny corner of the internet. Combine that with the common usage of access/friend-locked posts and one gets a community of fast, technical conversations where half of the most important ones go on behind closed doors.

I actually like that about the community, but I can also see why it's very hard for someone who isn't a LJ/DW user to even know about these conversations, never mind participate in/report on them.

[starlady]

*nods* Oo, 'dense' is a really good word for it.

Definitely as a joint community we are very hypertextual and cross-referencing. I think the other thing too is that the popular image of LJ is, hrm, teenager-ish? There's a part early in The Social Network where Zuckerberg live-blogs hacking Harvard's house lookbooks while trashing his ex-girlfriend on his LJ, and I think that's the approximate image of LJ in the wider culture, even of the internet, while DW usually doesn't register. If it does, I think its image isn't the same, but it's much less well-known. All of which does make it difficult for people to know where to start if they aren't already on either LJ or DW or both.