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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.

LiveJournal was started in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. Fitzpatrick owns Danga Interactive, the company that owns and operates LiveJournal.

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.

Similar to other online services, users may upload a small graphical icon, referred to as user picture or userpic by LiveJournal users, by which to define one's self to the rest of the community (this user picture functions as the user's avatar). This optional small image may take a maximum viewing size of 100 by 100 pixels. LiveJournal's free users, which account for approximately 94% of the network, may have a limit of 3 interchangeable ones. Paid account holders may have many more (over a dozen), and can pay optional fees for additional user picture slots.

One's icon, if present, will appear next to one's username when others view one's post on their friend's page, as well as on one's main LiveJournal site at a specific location dependent upon the layout.

The software running the site is open source and primarily written in Perl. It is also used by several other sites.

Community

Demographics

As of December 2004, nearly five and a half million accounts had been created, of which approximately 1.4 million had been updated at some point in the last 30 days . Of those users who provided their date of birth, the vast majority were in the 15-23 age group. Of those who specified their gender, more than two thirds were female.

LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries (although there is a language selection feature), and the United States has by far the most LiveJournal users among users who choose to list a location. There is also a sizable Russian contingent, as many Russians have turned to LiveJournal as their primary blogging engine. Following are rounded figures from December 2004:

User interaction

As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's 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 .) 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.

Notable users

Certain LiveJournals have become famous throughout the years for their especially interesting content, including political commentary and anecdotal advice on subjects ranging from household care to aquariums. The most famous is arguably that of Rachelle Waterman, known on LiveJournal as smchyrocky, who was arrested on November 19, 2004 for the murder of her mother. Her journal became a source of much discussion among the Internet community and the media, especially her final entry mentioning her mother's death. Other notable LiveJournal users include Jamie Zawinski (jwz) and Poppy Z. Brite (docbrite).

Frank the Goat

Frank the Goat is LiveJournal's mascot. Frank is treated like an actual living being by much of the LiveJournal userbase, and his brief "biography" as well as his "journal" reflect this. Frank the Goat's catch phrase is "Baaaaah."

Sometimes, callers to LiveJournal's PhonePost service are informed "Frank the Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly.

Social networking

The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is one-directional. Each user chooses a list of users that they list as "friends". It conveniently allows the user to read all of their friends entries on a single page.

The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term. A users list of friends usually includes several communities and RSS feeds in addition to real users. Friending a user is the basic security concept on LiveJournal. Generally, it allows the friends of a user to read protected entries but friends can be grouped further for better security.

The dual meaning of friend being those you read and those you trust doesn't necessarily have the same social definition used in everyday speech. Even the real users on a friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships, general interest, courtesy (friending back someone who friended you), or people you read but actually dislike.

The fact that "friend" is used, without qualification, to describe vastly different things in LiveJournal sometimes is a source of conflict or hurt feelings. This is intensified by the fact that "friending" and "defriending" is as simple as clicking a button, while real life friendships are formed and unmade over longer periods of time. Since the friend concept on LiveJournal is uni-directional, any user can friend any other user. Many users are sensitive to being listed as a "friend of" a controversial user or someone they actively dislike.

The word friend continues to be used to define these multi-faceted relationships on LiveJournal because it reflects the designers intent to have LiveJournal become more like an off-line community than some other purely on-line organizational structure.

Controversies

Invite system

From September 2, 2001 until December 12, 2003, the growth of LiveJournal was put under control by an "invite code" system. This was because the number of users was increasing faster than the server architecture could handle. New users needed to either obtain 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 was met with mixed feelings and a surprisingly large 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.

Abuse team decisions

As LiveJournal has grown, it has had to deal with issues involving the content it hosts. Like most web logging hosts, it has adopted a basic Terms of Service . The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as spamming, copyright violation, harassment, etc. LiveJournal created an abuse team and processes to handle claims about violations of the Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the law, and other issues.

The abuse team at LiveJournal has frequently come under criticism for their handling of alleged violations. Many users felt the abuse team over-reacted to cases in disregard of the actual Terms of Service. A small controversy arose in November 2004 when a policy document used by the abuse team was leaked to a group of its critics before it was due to be released. Comparisons between the policy and the Terms of Service were inevitable, with some feeling that the former were more restrictive than the latter, and others believing that the Terms of Service are very wide in scope and encompass everything within the policy document. The policy document has since been officially released , as they had been intended to be.

A small number of users who have been affected by abuse team policies have made the decision to abandon LiveJournal in favor of other blogging sites, though the number of such users is very small compared to LiveJournal's total user-base. It has, however, exacerbated the opinion held by some that LiveJournal is a fine host for teenage diaries and social networking but can not be a platform for serious web journaling. Others feel that the abuse team is performing a worthwhile job, banning only those with ill intentions and histories of clear Terms of Service violations. In their opinion LiveJournal is a viable choice for serious web publishing, so long as one does not wish to cause trouble.

Other sites running the LiveJournal engine

Because LiveJournal is an open source project, many other communities have been designed using the LiveJournal software. These, however, with the exception of DeadJournal, tend to be unstable and short-lived. An example of this is the August 2004 closing of uJournal, which temporarily left approximately 100,000 accounts without hosting before the content was moved to AboutMyLife.

LiveJournal timeline

See also

External links

tokipona:LiveJournal

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