T w e n t y S i d e d
Some notes about LiveJournal:
A majority of my (visible) readership hails from LJ. Most of my incoming links are from LJ pages. A lot of my comments are from LJ users. (Have I said thanks? Lately? No? Hey: Thanks.)
I’m sure I have over 100 LJ links. Contrast this with MySpace (2 incoming links) or Blogger.com (none, that I’ve noticed) or Blogspot (one, that I’ve noticed). One of my favorite things to do is go to sites who’ve linked me and see what they are all about. I’ve found some crazy stuff that way, some interesting stuff, and some sites that I return to on a regular basis.
Now I wonder: Why is this site so popular among LJ users, and not so in the other blogging communities? (I’m talking about the community sites like LJ, MySpace, BSpot, etc. I’m not talking about just random domains or forums.) It’s entirely possible that this is just due to it not attracting attention in these other areas, but I can’t imagine these groups are that isolated from each other. If Blogspot users were interested in the site, it seems it might have made the rounds by now. So, what I strongly suspect is that these communities have very different sorts of people. Perhaps they like different things, or perhaps they behave differently when it comes to linking & sharing.
This bugs me, because I feel like there is some underlying complexity or pattern that I’m missing. The traffic is too unbalanced to be random – there is a reason why links from LJ users outnumber all other types of links combined.
Having said this, I must say I can never get the hang of LJ. To avoid implicating anyone, here is a fictitious yet realistic example of one of my many, many trips into LJ:
I’ll see a comment from someone named “HPFan“. They will say something nice about my work, and so I’ll want to visit their site and find out a bit about them. If nothing else, it would be nice to know their gender so I know if I should use “he” or “she” in my reply. Their name links to their website, which is amazing-rando.livejournal.com. I visit the site, and see the site is named Shiva’s Lair. Their user portrait is a .gif animation of Hello Kitty saying “Die. Mortals.” Under this picture It will say User: amazing-rando, and under that it says, Name: Poetic Crank. As a bonus, they may offer an email link like: agent69@gmail.com. As someone who has always blogged and emailed and comented and posted under his own, real name, I am confused by this. To me, it’s like this person has six names.
If I made a LJ site, it would be shamusyoung.livejournal.com, my site name would be something like “Shamus’ Place”, and would say User: Shamus. Name: Shamus. Email: [email protected]. And the user picture would be a picture of me. However, I’ve never seen a single LJ user do this. I think I’d be breaking some sort of taboo.
I’ll surf around Shiva’s Lair and try to find out a bit about this person who was good enough to visit my site and pay me a compliment. The site itself will instantly make me feel out of touch, because it will be centered around some aspect of online culture which I have never heard of, and that is apparently very established, complex, popular, and quite beyond my understanding. Like, maybe the site is frequented by a group of people who spend their time translating the entire series of Harry Potter books into iambic pentameter Shakespearian prose. They will have their own acronyms and terms for things, so much so that I’ll understand less than half of what they have to say.
I’ll suddenly feel like a small town priest visiting the big city, who unwittingly blunders into a dimly lit fetish club for BDSM enthusiasts, some of whom like to dress up like nuns and priests. I may escape with my virtue and sanity intact, but I’ll be left with the frightening realization that the world is so much bigger than I imagined.
LATER: A further note is that I find sites which link me by looking at Technorati. It’s possible that I’m getting BSpot / Blogger / MySpace links that Technorati isn’t finding, or that LJ is just more Technorati friendly.
