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LiveJournal

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LiveJournal (often abbreviated LJ or lj) is the name of a website where Internet users can keep a journal or diary, as well as the name of the server software that was designed to run it. It is one of many sites that come under the term blog, or weblog.

A number of features distinguish LiveJournal from other blog sites, one of which is the "Friends page", a list of the most recent posts from people a user has added to their "Friends list" — turning LiveJournal into a community of interconnected weblogs, and shifting it toward being social network software. Another such distinguishing feature is the employment of the S2 template system to allow users to customise the appearance and behaviour of their weblogs.

The software running the site is open source and is used by other sites.

History

LiveJournal was started in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities.

LiveJournal is owned by Danga Interactive, which is in turn owned by Fitzpatrick.

Invite codes

From September 2, 2001 until December 12, 2003, because the number of users was increasing faster than the server architecture could handle, the growth of LiveJournal was put under control by an "invite code" system. New users needed to either obtain such an invite code from an existing user, or buy a paid account (which reverts to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system also had the side effect of helping prevent abuse, by deterring people from creating many throw-away accounts. The invite code system was lifted after a number of major improvements to the overall site architecture.

The removal of the invite code system met with mixed feelings and a surprisingly high amount of opposition. A number of users felt that the invite code system gave LiveJournal a touch of elitism, or a closed-community feel. Others, including LiveJournal's management, pointed out that when first introduced, the invite code system was intended to be temporary.

Community

As of January 2004, nearly two million accounts had been created, of which approximately 830,000 had been updated at some point in the last month . Between them, these users make about 200,000 individual posts per day. Of those users who provided their date of birth, the vast majority are in the 15-22 age group. Of those who specified their gender, almost two thirds are female. LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries (although there is a language selection feature), and the United States has the most LiveJournal users by far. Following are rounded figures from January 2004:

  • United States - 1,232,000
  • Canada - 85,000
  • United Kingdom - 69,000
  • Australia - 33,000

Like most weblogs, people can comment on each others' journals and create a message board-style thread of comments — each comment can be replied to individually, starting a new thread from every one. All users, including non-paying users, can set various options for comments: they can instruct the software to only accept comments from those on their Friends list or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts), or not allow commenting at all. In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group discussion boards, or "communities," encompassing a myriad of subjects. (For example, there is a community dealing specifically with Misplaced Pages .) A community is created as a regular journal account, and can then be converted into a community account. Each community has one or more maintainers, who have access to the options and settings regarding the community account.

LiveJournal relies heavily on user contributions and volunteer efforts. The LiveJournal Support area is run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Similarly, the website is translated into other languages by volunteers. Although programming is mainly done by employees and the original creator himself, user contributions in this area are also reviewed and considered.

Other sites running the LiveJournal engine

Because LiveJournal is an open source project, many other communities have been designed using the LiveJournal software. However, these, apart from DeadJournal, tend to be unstable and short-lived. These include, but are not limited to:

LiveJournal timeline

See also

External links

tokipona:LiveJournal