Many moons ago I was a member of LiveJournal (and blogger, and wordpress, and twitter, and identi.ca, and MySpace, and Vox). Invariably the reason for joining the various services was a mixture of curiousity, and to interact with friends using those services.
With curiosity firmly in mind, I have returned to LiveJournal this morning to take a look (and to reclaim the username I once held there).
I have been pleasantly surprised - while the architecture of LiveJournal hasn’t changed, the experience isn’t as bad as I remember (the architecture’s consistency is perhaps because of their new ownership - following the original creators building “Vox”, which caused something of a temporal rift in the LiveJournal user community).
It’s easy to forget just how popular LiveJournal once was - before the rise of Blogger and WordPress, many hundreds of thousands of people regularly wrote journals on LiveJournal, subscribed and contributed to self created groups, and forged true online communities.
The world that blogging has evolved into seems to be much more about the individual rather than the community, and while both are valid it often feels that writing a blog is a very lonely activity.
I shall explore LiveJournal over the next few weeks when opportunity presents itself, and write again soon about my experiences.
If you would like to join me, feel free to add me as a friend - my homepage is http://jonbeckett73.livejournal.com.