The Dynamics of Weblogs

[coalescent]

From Corante, comments on AOL's entry into the weblogging market:

The weblog world has, broadly speaking, three basic patterns -- tight conversation, loose conversation, and publication. These correspond to a cluster of friends using LiveJournal, any of the conversations going on around technical issues (scripting languages, CSS, Echo etc), and comment-free nanopublishing like Gawker or InstaPundit.
[...]
The advantage of such tight connection, as with the Friends feature of LiveJournal, is that it makes the experience fun for people who don't want and won't get a large audience -- it's not much fun to write for 6 random strangers, but it can be lots of fun to write for your 6 best friends. (I think this "Small clusters creating internal value" effect is what makes LiveJournal's churn rate so low relative to tools like blogger.) The disadvantage is that such tight clusters tend to be insular -- though LiveJournal claims more than double the number of active users as blogger, very few LiveJournal URLs ever make dayblogpopdex. LiveJournal is vast, active, and largely disconnected from the rest of the weblog world.

Leaving aside cheap shots about the potential impact of millions of AOL users suddenly entering the blogosphere, the piece is an articulartion of something that's been niggling at me for a while now: The disjunction between Livejournal and the wider blogosphere. It doesn't sit right with me. The very terminology is pejorative - Livejournal is different. Livejournal is outside.

One reason for the current situation is design. Livejournal was, obviously, built as a community tool; as the piece says, it's fun to write for your friends. And because design leads content, a natural follow-on is that the content will largely be personal, mundane, and of little interest to the wider world. By contrast, the blogosphere that attracts the most commentary in the media is the more professional, ideas- and news-focused variant. That's the exciting end of the spectrum; that is, perhaps, where things seem genuinely new.

I don't think I'm arguing that the focus is misplaced. And in some ways, the situation is exactly what you'd expect. Introduce a new technology and it gets adapted to fill various niches, and by definition niches are exclusive. Specialisation can also be a strength; As a reader, I like to know what to expect. My problem is that niches are also insular. For instance: Livejournal has been a gift to fandoms - LJ fan groups such as mutant_allies are an unusual combination of message board and newsgroup, and seem able to bind a community together in a particularly strong way - but as a general rule, communities exist unaware of each other. Pull back a bit, and you can see this as the LJ/blogosphere fracture in macrocosm: Most bloggers won't be reading Livejournals because they wouldn't expect to find anything of value there, and most Livejournalers won't be reading blogs simply because they aren't aware of them.

There should be some kind of combined ground. The prevalence of RSS feeds helps, but you can't (for instance) trackback between Livejournals and non-livejournals. Cultural differences exist between Blogger and Livejournal, and that's fine - and in fact, to be encouraged - but integration between the two worlds would benefit everyone.

(Of course, some people think the whole thing's going to hell in a handbasket anyway...)

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

The only real disconnect is that people on LJ don't tend to use blogrolls to show who or what they read. Trackback is really a Moveable Type feature only, and LJ paid accounts do now support weblogs.com pings. RSS is really the *onl* common ground in the web logs worls - though, I do think the emergent ECHO standard will be better and more suited for linking web logging sites (that's if the Userland FUD doesn't kill it).

At some point I really must update my front page to point at a place where I can have an up to date OPML file for people to download and stick in their RSS feed clients so they can see what I read on a day to day basis outside of my friends list...

I also understand LJ is an enthusiastic supporter of ECHO. Which IMHO is a good thing...

hmm, I thought, what the heck is dayblogpopdex?

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

well, let us google

Your search - dayblogpopdex - did not match any documents.
No pages were found containing "dayblogpopdex".

hmmm. Presumably, it's a blogger thingy. Maybe it says something on the Blogger.com home page?

Ah, that'd be a no, then.

Popdex, then, it must be something to do with popdex. er, no, not in any esily-findable sense. and anyway, it just froze solid. Maybe this popularity index they refer to has been discontinued for trashing any website it pointed at ....

Re: hmm, I thought, what the heck is dayblogpopdex?

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

He was conflating Daypop and Blogdex. Or, if you prefer, blogdex and daypop_news/daypop_top40. Blogdex routinely has a higher interest rate for me (and was, in fact, where I came across the original link).

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Ah. I appear to have inadvertantly given the impression I have more than a smattering of knowledge in this area. In fact, I know very little about either ECHO, or OPML files. Any chance you could point me at some sources?