[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

Warren Ellis is writing a novel on the Internet. Using LiveJournal. It starts here. You also get occasional comments on LiveJournal itself:

Sometimes I think of LiveJournal as the world’s biggest technogoth community. LJ has been both lauded and derided as a space for people with black clothes and strange hair to work out their alienation and disaffection in electronic public. That hasn’t stopped it being successful, and it hasn’t stopped it being a tool for national and international networking. As a piece of “social software,” it’s not flawless, but its influence and effect has been huge.

The first thing we all do when we find out about this: we link to it. The second thing we do, those of us who have LiveJournal accounts: we add him to our friends list.

Stop and think about that one for a second. On LiveJournal, adding someone to your friends list doesn’t just mean you can read their entries easily. It also means that they’re on the list of people who can read your private entries, unless you’ve customized things a little.

At the moment, 332 people have added Warren Ellis to their friends list. He has access to the private entries of, well, most of those people. He can read them talking about things they don’t mean to show to anyone they don’t know — let alone a writer who’s always searching for new material for his perverted comic books.

In my universe, I’m going to believe that he did this on purpose, knowing full well what access he would be granted.

Comments

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

*guffaw*

Yeah. That's about right.

[patchworkkid.livejournal.com]

Sleazy and Dia-freakin'-bolical, if you're correct.

[skylion.livejournal.com]

...yet I noticed that you are on the friends list. I put myself on the list. OMG, we might be characters in a piece of work by Warren Ellis. I want to be Spider's pancreas.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Bryant could put himself on the friends list without fear of repercussion because it doesn't give Ellis access to anything he didn't already have access to: he doesn't post anything locked to all his friends. (Neither do I. It seems the safest way to go.)

[skylion.livejournal.com]

I don't either. And I never really post anything that sensative. That being said. Why would Warren Ellis be interested in the lot of us anyway? Surely he can come up with (and has come up with) better stuff on his own.

[bryant]

Well, I wasn't entirely serious. On the other hand, he did follow up over on my blog (the comment consisted entirely of 'Moo hoo ha ha.'), so who knows?

[skylion.livejournal.com]

/sarcasm
"Moo hoo ha ha". This is from the man that suggested the way to kill Captian America was to drug him and have him wake up naked with a bunch of underage brazilian rent boys--suicide to follow. Your in trouble man.
/end sarcasm

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

There was previously a security "hole" (or misunderstanding maybe) where people who added a community to the friends list would be exposing their private entries to the community's owner. I think that was changed so that if something is marked as a "community", then logging in as the community itself would not allow you to read private entries. (But, I haven't visited the link to see if the work marks itself as a community)