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[bryant]

Doc Searls makes a really good point about the nature of weblogs, and I think it's relevant to why I chose to move my daily meanderings off of LiveJournal. (Yes, I know some of you are reading them there. Don't distract me.) He says, inspired by this comment by Clay Shirky, that weblogs are like radio. Webloggers are broadcasting to the world, rather than having a conversation with their readers. And you know, that's pretty much true.

LiveJournal is much more oriented towards conversations. The community feature is perhaps the most obvious facet of this, but the friends pages are another one. You create a community with your friends page. I've had, on occasion, the experience of being surprised that two people on my friends page don't know each other -- "but they post right next to each other! How odd!" And, of course, since everyone can see who you're friends with, there's a tendency for friend groups to overlap like crazed Venn diagrams. It'd be kind of fun to crunch some numbers on that, see if it's possible to find the friend clusters and how much they overlap, but I don't really have the techniques.

I'd be curious to hear from any of my LJ readers: does my journal there feel any different than anyone else's? Do you notice that I'm not really writing for that particular submedium? Do I look odd on your friends list, besides that I have links in all my titles and I ramble on at great length?

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Your posts are different - but in a good way.

Most people are posting about events in their life or their current emotional state. Which is great - my number one reason for using livejournal is to keep in touch with people that I don't talk to regularly, and this accomplishes that purpose.

But your posts have much more content, as in things to read and think about. And I like being passed on these memes. I don't always feel a need to comment on them, and they're not as community-ish, but I read a lot of them.

Livejournal is, and this isn't inconsiderable, a very convenient place for me to gather disparate broadcasts from people I care about. I'm very cranky about having Yet Another Web Page to click on weekly or daily - but with livejournal, they're all there in one place. It's the big mall of weblogs, which beats driving all over town.

Your compromise, with (I assume) auto-reposting to LJ, suits me just fine, because I get the content I want in the convenient LJ package.