The Mandelbear's Musings

12:02 pm - Some pre-strike analysis

Editorial: Missing Interests and Planned User Strike on Livejournal

The purchase of Livejournal by a Russian-owned company raised questions at the time of SUP's commitment to LJ's long-standing relationship with its user community, for good and ill. The recent decision to drop the ad-free Basic account is "a business decision. It is, emphatically." It may however be a poor business decision, one made in the hopes of making a fast buck off the content provided by the users without understanding the background of those users' relationship with the site. The removal, for whatever reason, of possibly controversial interests gives users good reason to worry that we are not wanted on a site we helped make so popular. The restoration of those interests, allowing us our thoughts on yaoi once more, does not immediately restore our faith in the company, especially with the clandestine removal of the primary way in which most of us first came to the site (and then brought our friends).

In short, Livejournal users no longer feel like customers, but product, and that's bad business all around.

09:11 pm - Post-strike analysis

My analysis of today's LJ content strike can be found at:

http://steve.savitzky.net/Doc/Web/2008/missing_the_point/

Many of the people on my flist are respecting the strike (reluctantly in some cases); many more are ignoring it either because they haven't heard about it, or because they don't believe in either its goals, its methods, or both. A few have gone on to post the reasons why they are or are not respecting it. Almost all the arguments I've seen, on both sides of the debate, are missing the point entirely. I don't think even the originators of the strike understand it fully.

Bottom line: it was never intended as an economic weapon; it's merely a simple, reasonably painless way of sending a message both to LJ's Russian overlords, the public at large, and to ourselves. Of the three, the message to ourselves is perhaps the most important:

Leaving LJ isn't really a good option right now, because there's still a community here. If we could all pull up roots and transfer our blogs, our comments, and our network of friends over to someplace better, I think most of us would do it. I think we should be figuring out how to do just that, and not by moving to another centralized service that will eventually betray us in turn, but by building a decentralized community that can keep us in touch after we all take back control of our own content and "to our scattered servers go".

Some post-strike links I like: a post-strike analysis from technoshaman, and a good economic and cultural analysis by chipotle (by way of lysana). A striker returns...and responds to the critics by thatcrazycajun. (added 3/22: this post is also noted in comments to this post by beckyzoole.)

Current Mood: tired

04:59 pm - Striking but futile gesture

The 24 hour LJ content strike begins at midnight GMT on Friday, which works out to 5pm here on the US West Coast.

It will be a largely futile gesture; I was originally not going to participate. But after reading this interview with Anton Nosik of SUP (the new owners), [he provides a response here], I was sufficiently infuriated to join in. This despite the fact that theljstaff, hiding behind a pseudonym in an obscure account, has posted a half-hearted apology. beckyzoole lists some reasons for going through with the strike here.

Do I think the strike will have any effect whatever on LJ? No. But it will have an effect on those who participate, and on those who read our journals. LJ has, once again, shown its total contempt for its users. Fine. The strike is our gesture of our contempt for them. Sure, it's the equivalent of shaking your fist at the bus that just splashed mud on you as it drove by. But it feels good. See you tomorrow.

Current Mood: calm

11:54 am - Quote of the Day

Blogging and Newspapers, a Lesson in How Not to Brand and Market - Blog Maverick

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business.

07:03 am - Explore LJ - threat or menace?

As most of my flist probably knows by now, LJ has added a controversial new feature called Explore LJ - you can see the actual page here. It looks a lot like Google News, only restricted to LJ.

Although I think it's a transparent attempt to monetize user-generated content, I don't think it's a privacy violation, and I'm not going to opt out. Here's why: I want my blog to be noticed.

Sitting in my front closet right now are about 500 copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song. If a few thousand more people get pointed to it and a few dozen of them decide to buy a copy, I'm not going to complain. At all.

For similar reasons, my LJ is indexed on Google and any other search engine that cares to drink from the firehose of LJ's live feed. I rarely friends-lock, and consider anything I post to be public. I have a long history of this, going back to my days in alt.callahans, and it's too late to back out now even if I wanted to.

(I'm in the process of setting up a private journal, where I can control access separately to every post. That's different: it'll be encrypted, unsearchable by anyone but me, and on servers totally under my control.)

Damn the torpedos search engines, full speed ahead!

07:41 am - Many are cold,...

... but the fileserver still isn't frozen. I'm going to take this as a hopeful sign. If it works, it would also mean that the other 400GB drive I was having trouble with is also usable. I have a pretty good idea what I could do with, for example, a 400GB eSATA drive.

In other cold-related news, some anonymous person sent me a virtual gift of a polar bear cub with the note "Spread More Joy" attached. Um... Thank you very much, whoever you are!

(The cynic in me wonders whether this might actually be a random freebie intended to promote the giving of virtual gifts, but... It's cute anyway. Anyone else get one? Anyone out there giving virtual gifts?)

06:54 pm - Account updates are for lemmings

Account type: Permanent Account
Date created: 2002-06-08 16:52:29
Date updated: 2008-01-01 09:12:48, 17 hours ago
Virtual Gifts Received: 0
Journal entries: 2,922
Comments: Posted: 7,559 - Received: 5,315

07:34 pm - We interrupt your LJ friends list...

... to bring you the following special announcement:

SixApart has sold LJ to SUP.

SUP? SUP is the company that has been operating LJ -- very successfully -- in Russia. Considering our ongoing problems with 6A, this is probably a good thing for LJ, though that remains to be demonstrated.

You can read the press releases here in news; there are also two new communities to be aware of: lj_2008 and lj_policy.

We now return you to your usual friends list.

Current Mood: indescribable

06:21 am - Worth noting: LJ comments

A couple of weeks ago I switched anonymous comments back on, so that people who don't have LJ accounts can comment. Anonymous comments are screened, so after you post one it won't show up until I look at it and decide it isn't spam or flame-bait.

It's also worth noting that LJ accepts OpenID, so if you have a blog or a website somewhere else that groks the protocol, you can use that.

11:42 am - Spyware is spyware is objectionable, and other matters

Techdirt: Court Rules That Anti-Spyware Companies Can Call Spyware Spyware

...The judge dismissed the lawsuit, noting that security firms have every right to label software as they see fit, citing part of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

We often point to section 230, because it protects service providers from liability for the actions of the service providers' users. However, this is referring to a different part of section 230, which says that no service provider is liable for a good faith attempt to restrict access to something it deems objectionable. The court felt that the security company was a service provider, and that since it believed Zango was objectionable, then it has every right to try to restrict it. The court makes a second very important point. Zango complains that its software is not objectionable, and therefore the security providers cannot block it as objectionable. However, the court points out that the statute clearly says that it's for what the service provider finds objectionable. In other words, the content in question need not be "objectionable" at all -- it only matters what the service provider feels about it. This is a pretty strong endorsement for the idea that security companies absolutely can call software whatever they feel is appropriate.

09:26 pm - Corporate ownership of communities considered harmful.

This post by elements (found by way of this post on fandom_flies) talks about "the user as citizen":

This issue of ownership is much bigger than Six Apart and Livejournal, because it's really about how we as a culture construct the new class of relationships between citizens and businesses that is embodied by the interactive, hyper-connected social nodes that form the new structures through which modern humans are organizing our public lives.

I'd like to propose that any business entity that is primarily driven by and dependent on an active and content-generating user base be obligated to assign some share of real and actualized decision-making power to democratically chosen representatives of that user base. Obviously I don't expect to see this spring into being in law overnight, or even perhaps at all, and I'm not sure that would even be appropriate. But I would like to see businesses encode this principle into their very structures in such a way that we the users - we the citizens of the social web - can count on a certain measure of rights and due process, beyond what we are legally owed by a corporate entity.

That's one possibility, and it's certainly worth pursuing, but I don't think it's likely to work. Let me propose a few others. I think they all have their place, and it's an open question which is going to work better:

• User-owned services: This is the tried and tested model of credit unions, mutual insurance companies, and co-ops. One user, one vote, and everybody owns an equal share. If LJ had gone this route, and had stuck with paid and invited members, we wouldn't be in this mess.
• User-owned servers: This uses the even more tried and tested principle of "A Person's Home is their Castle." What's on my server at home, under a domain name that I own, is a lot harder to take away. ISPs and phone companies are under much stricter rules about when they can deny you service than are corporations that own their own servers and kindly let you put your content on them. The nice thing about this option is that it scales well -- exactly like the Web, in fact. Search engines and cooperative tag servers take the place of centralized databases, and even searching and tagging can, and should, eventually be decentralized.
• Anonymous peer-to-peer: This is the Freenet model. Your content is encrypted, and widely replicated. Anyone with the document ID and key, which you can publish widely as well, can retrieve it and decrypt it. With wide, random distribution it becomes practically impossible to find and delete every copy of something (though it may become hard to find a copy for a while). Something like this has the potential to go a long way toward fixing the current problems with both censorship and overly-restrictive copyright.

Ultimately I think we're going to have all four: a push toward user representation on corporate-owned services, user-owned co-operative services, federated private servers, and anonymous peer-to-peer networks. I'm directing my own efforts toward federated private servers and anonymous peer-to-peer because they're the best fit for my cynical, old, anarchistic hacker's soul. (And, I might add, a pretty good fit with what some of my coworkers are doing, which hopefully will be published soon.)

But if someone else wants to write a Community Member's Bill of Rights I'll be happy to sign it, and if somebody wants to build a user-owned co-op community I'd be delighted to buy a share.

07:46 pm - More on Strikethrough 07.2

This post by technoshaman points to annathepiper's recent post, which indicates that word of the latest LJ kerfluffle has been spreading, getting as far as Firefox News.

Now, whether Abe Hassan's comments on efw can reasonably be construed as "insulting to fandom" or merely a misguided and tactless attempt to get into the spirit of the Existential Flame War, the fact is that people have been construing it as an insult, adding to a rising tide of cynicism and anger. There is no doubt whatever that Hassan is a SixApart employee who makes official announcements on news, and should have known better (added) than to stick his oar into a hornet's nest (to mix a metaphor slightly).

There's an interesting contradiction in LJ's Terms of Service: Section XIV.2 seems to say that they have to notify you before they take anything down:

Should any Content that you have authored be reported to LiveJournal as being offensive or inappropriate, LiveJournal might call upon you to retract, modify, or protect (by means of private and friends only settings) the Content in question within a reasonable amount of time, as determined by the LiveJournal staff. Should you fail to meet such a request from LiveJournal staff, LiveJournal may terminate your account. LiveJournal, however, is under no obligation to restrict or monitor journal Content in any way;

... but section XVI says

You agree to NOT use the Service to:

1. Upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; [my emphasis]

... and ends with:

If LiveJournal determines, in its sole and absolute discretion, that any user is in violation of the TOS, LiveJournal retains the right to terminate such user's account at any time without prior notice.

Which gives them a loophole they can drive a stretch hummer through, and they've obviously been invoking this clause with a heavy hand to please whatever entities are yanking their chain this week. It's an open question whether this loophole is a recent addition to the TOS, and whether it would get them into trouble if it came down to a court battle. I wouldn't count on it.

Bottom line: don't trust 'em. Back up your posts yourself, and start looking for a way to move your primary blog to a host -- or multiple hosts -- under your own control. To your scattered servers go, in other words.

Current Mood: cynical

10:13 am - Book-burning

The New Adventures of Queen Victoria has a good comment on some of the latest LJ ugliness. (Also pointed to by filkertom; unfortunately the post has been deleted.) In that post, a simple gratuitous mention of H.censored P.censoredand c.censored p.censored drew an immediate snarky comment from an burrLJ employee86.

From which we conclude that LJ is scrutinizing every damned post for keywords. Not really surprising; so is Google, only for a different reason. LJ has also set themselves up as sole judge, jury, and executioner of what content is permitted by their Terms of Service. OK, they can do that: it's their site. I have a permanent account, so I can't send them much of a message by not sending them any more money. (Shakes fist at sky.)

This post by technoshaman has a little more to say about it, and tibicina draws our attention to the fandom_action community for discussion of legal issues and legal action around fandom. More on the recent journal deletions here and here.

technoshaman also points to an airline pilot's take on security. The stupidity isn't entirely confined to LJ.

Current Mood: angry

08:44 pm - Iconic lemmings?

( Pictures of my LiveJournal Friends )


Try out this Meme

Brought to you by NardVille

03:08 pm - Life, the universe, and lemmings

Seen many places on my flist, here's a link to my 42^nd LJ post. My life in a nutshell, I guess. Can't speak for the universe.

05:19 pm - So here I am at Westercon

...waiting for my next panel to start. It's on blogging, so I figured this way I'd be the first panel member to blog about it. The fact that it's during what I would normally consider to be dinner time is particularly annoying, especially when concerts start at 7:00.

With luck I'll have time for a bowl of chili and a quick rehearsal. I have only about half an hour's worth of Tres Gique pieces lined up; if I can run for an hour i'm prepared to wing it...

10:19 pm - Permanent Memberships

So I see that permanent memberships are going on sale again -- for a week, starting Thursday. I've given them as gifts in the past, but I won't be doing it this year. I don't trust LJ anymore -- they're more concerned about looking good to investors than they are about their users' freedom of speech. (I was originally thinking of giving one as a graduation present, but I have since thought of something more personal, and arguably more useful.)

Like technoshaman says in this post, I'm looking forward to a day when we have a completely distributed blogosphere, where everyone controls their own content and it isn't tied to anyone else's server.

It's closer than you think.

Current Mood: grumpy

08:58 am - Interests -- let's start a movement!

I have included the following paragraph in my bio, and added the appropriate interests.

Note on interests: Regardless of what ignorant morons have put as a "rule of thumb" in a sidebar to the interests list, the word "interest" does not mean "liking" or "approval". It means that I am interested in discussing a topic. For example, my interests list contains the word "censorship", which I thoroughly disapprove of. It also contains "La Marseillaise" in spite of the fact that the chorus could easily be misconstrued by ignorant morons as a death threat against my enemies. I don't necessarily approve of that sentiment; I just like the song. Got it?

Feel free to include this paragraph in your own profile, with or without credit. And if three people -- just three people -- put "La Marseillaise" in their interests lists, they just might think it's a movement...

Current Mood: grumpy

10:37 pm - ... and what to do about it.

In previous post I described the recent unpleasantness and suggested that I had the beginnings of an answer. This article gives a little more information, and notes that many are jumping ship to LJ clones like JournalFen and GreatestJournal. But I don't think that's the answer.

As I said before, we need to take back our content.

There are some details I haven't worked out -- I'd like to have a simple, complete out-of-the-box package, but all I have are pieces. Here are the basics, though, and a few tools to get you started:

You need a place on the web where you can host static web pages, preferably in a domain that you own and without anyone else's advertising. But your ISP will do to get started. You do not need to be able to run scripts or a database. If you have a DSL or cable connection you could even host it at home -- I think that's where we're heading, but we're not there yet.

You do that, if you want to, on your computer at home. A program like Blosxom or ikiwiki will let you format and organize your own web pages offline, and construct the RSS and HTML summary pages you need to make a proper blog. I'm working on a more geekish solution based on the Unix utility make. You don't really need either. Just make a subdirectory of your main web page called "blog", and make entries with paths like "/blog/2007/0530/2150.html" or maybe ".../2150/title.html".

In other words, every entry is either a web page or a directory (which lets you put any images the page uses together with the text). Now all you have to do is run a little script to generate the RSS and HTML summaries and upload any new pages to your public website using a program like rsync or a web-based version-control system like Subversion or git.

Now, here's the part that will require a little more hacking on my part: there needs to be a script that parses the page for tags, builds the tag indices, and cross-posts to LJ or some other blogging site -- or sites -- based on the tags. That way, you can use LJ as your comment aggregator. The other missing piece is the little script that screen-scrapes LJ's email comment notifications and puts them back into your working directory. (You could run your own comment CGI script, but it seems like a lot of hassle. I stole this idea from ohiblather, by the way -- she has multiple blogs elsewhere on the web, and posts pointers to them in her LJ, which is also where she directs most of the comments.)

That takes care of the mechanics of blogging. I like the way Blosxom and ikiwiki let you integrate blogs and comments seamlessly into a website that might have much more in it. There's no reason, for example, why you can't allow comments on every page, or make a "changeblog" out of your version-control changelog entries to point your readers to new or revised pages.

The next thing you need is a "friends" page. Probably the easiest thing to use for that is Planet, a simple feed aggregator that generates a web page. Check out their list of planet-powered sites. But you don't have to publish your friends page at all if you don't want to; you can keep it on your own computer at home. And you'd better not if it has private or friends-locked posts on it, like you might acquire by reading your LJ friends page.

The thing I really don't have a good handle on is the community-building aspect of LJ. The rest of the blogosphere does this using things like trackbacks, pings, and blogrolls. I suspect that the FOAF project may be a large part of the answer: you put a machine-readable profile on your home page, and let FOAF-aware search engines do the rest.

What I'm really advocating is a move away from centralized services controlled by faceless corporations, back to a world where everyone (oops! ETA: runs their own node in the peer-to-peer network that is the Internet. Remember that TCP/IP is a peer-to-peer protocol -- which machine is the client and which the server depends entirely on what they're doing at any given moment.)

Current Mood: determined

08:36 pm - The Recent Unpleasantness

You can find a good, reasonably objective summary of "the recent unpleasantness" in this post by catrinella. In brief, LJ's abuse team has been suspending journals and communities based on certain trigger words in their interests lists. In addition to clearly-inappropriate content, the suspended journals include some clearly labeled as fiction, fanfic, and even survivors of child abuse.

The following quote from this article at news.com sums up the situation pretty well:

LiveJournal's terms of service ban "objectionable" content and say any account can be deleted "for any reason." But the company also claims to "provide users with as much freedom of speech as possible."

"Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues," countered Six Apart's Berkowitz. "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online)."

In other words, they are deliberately targeting fanfic and other material they feel would be offensive to their advertisers and corporate backers, possibly on the word of an external group. It's important to realize that this is merely the most recent in a long string of actions on LJ's and 6A's part that demonstrate that they are simply another soulless corporation interested only in their bottom line. Their site started out as a platform on which one could build a lively, living community. But now you can build your community only up to the point where it attracts the ire of anyone with money or influence. Then you're gone.

This is not surprising, and it represents the fundamental problem with all social websites: you don't control your content, the service does. They will host it only as long as it doesn't interfere with their bottom line.

The only way to control your content is to host it yourself. The only way to build a community that will last is to build strong links among the sites controlled by the community's members.

In my next post I'll make a stab at one way to set about doing this.

03:11 pm - Stats

Here are my current LJ stats, for what little they're worth:

Account type:	Permanent Account
Date created:	2002-06-08 16:52:29
Date updated:	2007-01-01 20:03:36, 3 hours ago
Journal entries:	2,066
Comments:	Posted: 4,554 - Received: 3,199

11:00 pm - Not a very productive day

Unfortunately, rather than record another take on "Guilty Pleasures", I ended up getting sucked in to another LJ design trainwreck, (more at the link) this one having to do with revisions to the "update journal" page. This is supposed to be the basic, last-resort, guaranteed-to-work way of updating your LJ. And they broke it. It's prettier now, but some features don't work if you don't have JavaScript enabled! I should know better than to get sucked in to one of these flamefests, but I seem to have been the first one to discover -- or at least to mention -- the Javascript problem. So I guess I've done something of value.

Looking at some of these designers' userpics you can see the problem: they're young. Inexperienced. Arrogant. They think they're hot stuff because they graduated from a program in "web design". Whee. They'll learn, eventually, but meanwhile they'll make life miserable for us old curmudgeons who don't count because we're not in LJ's target demographic.

I need to stop going off on these tangents, amusing though they are, and get some work done. Tomorrow: turn in my sales tax account application, and hack some more on TiddlyWiki. That, at least, will be fun.

08:52 pm - PSA: posting to friends groups with new update page

... only works if you have Javascript enabled. Yes, I'm reporting it as a bug. Only workarounds I can think of are to use a client or enable JS.

Update: 12-15 What breaks it is having JS turned off in a browser that normally supports it. Possibly also spoofing the user-agent in the headers.

Current Mood: angry

06:51 pm - Idiots!

So, once again, the LJ design team screws up and chooses to ignore user protests.

While we will not be offering an option to switch back to the old version, I hope we can work together to make changes and improve what we now have. Please understand that we love you guys and admittedly, we sometimes do things without fully understanding what the community reaction will be.

In other words, "we screwed up, but we're not going to fix it because you experienced users aren't bringing in any advertising revenue compared to all those newbies who set up plus accounts."

Fortunately, there's a cure for this one:

   emacs -f lj-compose

(Install from the ljupdate home page).

(Cross-posted to fucksixapart.)

Current Mood: annoyed

09:43 pm - Somebody needs to point cadhla...

...at this post, which is mostly uninteresting but ends with an extended discussion of the advantages of text messaging in the event of a zombie attack.

Consider this, you're at the park and suddenly there's a zombie outbreak. You're surrounded. What do you do? Call 911? Yeah, like they'll believe you. Under normal circumstances, you'd probably be turned into a zombie by now, but luckily for you, you've got TxtLJ.

Just whip out your phone and text, "postcomm.zombiekillers Umm...help, zombies are attacking me at the park" to TxtLJ (89855).

That'll post your message to the zombiekillers and you'll be rescued in no time*.

*TxtLJ should not be relied on in a zombie attack.

Current Mood: amused

07:19 am - Tea geekery

I would like to draw the attention of the tea snobs on my friends list to the teageeks community.

08:12 am - In case you were wondering...

... why I just added you to my friends list, it's almost certainly because you turned up on one or both of these lists of people who aren't on my friends list, but that are "close" by one measure or another. I won't feel bad if you don't friend me back; my friends list is mostly just a reading list.

Unlike some people, I have no reason (or excuse) to be shy about putting my real name in my LJ -- I'm Steve Savitzky, and you're most likely to know me (considering who's on my flist) from my filk songs.

This ends today's public service announcement; we now return you to your regularly scheduled web addiction.

07:06 am - TrustFlow results for mdlbear

NOTE: this meme tries to make up a post for you. Make sure you check the posting time, or you could end up posting from the wrong timezone! This confuses LJ and may cause subsequent posts to require backdating. OTOH it may simply be due to a server with a bad date; it is no longer possible for me to tell for sure.
(From capplor) here's another variant on "who's close to my friends", this time usingt TrustFlow II for LiveJournal. The following people not on the friends list for mdlbear are close by:

• wcg, jhayman (300 - 350)
• katyhh, shannachie, bardling (350 - 400)
• smallship1, trystel, fleetfootmike, oreouk (400 - 450)

Created by ciphergoth; hosted by LShift.

TrustFlow II: Who is closest to your friends list?

06:00 pm - Friendly lemmings

( Top 25 users that aren't my friends but possibly should be. )

As near as I can tell, they're all filkers or maybe people who hang around with filkers. No surprise there.

04:11 pm - Torches and pitchforks

This post by siderea voices many of the LJ users' concerns over recent developments very well, and a supposedly-reassuring post by bradfitz is not really very reassuring. I think I know the reason:

We users are not LJ's customer base.

LJ's true customers are the corporations that are selling ads and sponsoring communities. People with paid accounts are paying money not to see those ads; as soon as paid accounts become a sufficiently small fraction of their revenue stream, they won't have to listen to you. Permanent account holders are already insignificant. As far as LJ's corporate sponsors are concerned, we're just a big pile of eyeballs and a source of free "content" that serves as the bait that attracts more eyeballs.

LJ has a lot of momentum; it's a huge site, host to millions of people and lots of great communities. At one point I was happy and proud to be part of it. Now I'm just another user, sticking the needle in my arm three times a day for another fix.

I still like the community -- my community, of friends and family and people who share my interests, and all their friends and family. It would take a long time and a lot of work to replace all that, and it's not likely to happen. I'll still have a place here. But it's not going to feel as much like home anymore. I'll miss that.

In my last post I mentioned planning. I want to think about what it would take to build a community like LJ out of millions of personal blogs and websites -- including LJ blogs. I want to think about ways to use sites like LJ and Blogger and Myspace, instead of having them using us. I want to figure out ways for us to take back the blogosphere web Internet, damnit. There are tools out there we can use, but no good way to integrate, not the tools, but the people. It'll happen, though.

10:46 am - This could be bad

This announcement about "sponsored content" on LJ is just one more instance of LJ's downhill slide into corporate greed since it was sold out to Six Apart.

I have a paid-up permanent membership that I bought back when there were no ads on LJ; the reason I bought it was to have more features. I'm the beneficiary of a free community, mdlbear_albums, that my daughter started for me to discuss my CDs-in-progress. It doesn't have ads on it, and I like it that way. The header line of my LJ links to my website, where my commercial activities (such as they are) are carried out. So does my profile. My profile doesn't have any advertising in it, unless you consider an undecorated text link to be advertising. I don't. When I have CDs to sell I'll undoubtedly make a few links to the corresponding pages where they're offered for sale.

So far, "sponsored content" is just a potential annoyance: I don't have to look at any sponsored communities if I don't want to. I don't really have a problem with businesses buying paid memberships for their communities. Hell, I might even buy one myself when my album comes out. But not if it's more expensive than an ordinary paid membership.

But here's where I'm going to pack my bags and leave: if LJ starts demanding that I pay extra to link to my own damned products -- not banner ads, which would be against the terms of service that I'm ok with, just links. If LJ starts taking down fan communities because they conflict with some sponsor's message. If LJ starts putting somebody else's ads on my profile page, my LJ, or my friends page. If corporate marketing droids start trolling through interests and putting spam in my comments pages to promote their sleazy sponsored communities. And most importantly, if LJ stops being a community and starts being a pipeline for corporate crap.

This post by theclamsman proposes a protest on November 5^th that seems appropriate, and points off to GreatestJournal as an alternative (which it may be; I don't know).

Personally, I like the community aspect of LJ. I like having a friends list, and having a place where I can follow the blogs of many of my friends, acquaintances, and just plain interesting people all in one place without having to waste bandwidth running my own feed aggregator. I like having my blog on a well-connected, popular, high-bandwidth site, and don't mind paying for it. I especially like the fact that anyone who wants to follow my blog can create an LJ for free, put me on their friends list, and become part of a wider community without having to be a computer expert or run their own server. But I recognize that LJ is not being run for my benefit, or my friends' benefit, but for 6A's profit. Eventually they'll get greedy, and make things so bad that many of us will want to leave.

I think it's time to start planning. I don't think the world needs another huge site like LJ or even GJ. I like what ohiblather and a few other people do, making their LJ a mirror or a comments page for their "real" blog somewhere else. I may look into that. I rather like the idea of having a blog I control completely, on my own site, but that can still participate in a wider community of connected blogs on other sites. But not today. Not even this year -- I have other priorities. But it'll happen, if society doesn't collapse first.

Thoughts?

07:06 pm - Livejournal is not only stranger than we imagine...

It's stranger than we can imagine. But in a millennium that's already seen the Virgin Mary's image on a piece of toast up for auction on EBay, The daVinci Code and the recovery of the long-lost Gospel of Judas, I supposed we really should have expected something like The Gospel According to marysuemagdalen.

But nobody expects the...

Oh. Never mind.

09:55 pm - Are lemmings popular?

( 4.07/10 doesn't sound all that great, but it's 98th percentile. )

11:21 am - The past few days on LJ

The past few days according to LJ (approximately) according to azurelunatic. DO NOT read with food or drink in your mouth. (Link via celticdragonfly by way of sandy_tyras.)

08:23 pm - test ping

This is just a test to see whether my client still works after the latest round of LJ code churn.