'strike'

chipotle has a pretty thoughtful analysis on the changes that SUP is making to LJ and why. Looking at the front page of livejournal.ru versus the front page of livejournal.com (log out or you won't see it) really drives it home: SUP bought LJ because it is the Russian blogosphere. This is like buying the Technorati Top 10 in one fell swoop.

They don't give a shit about your new Harry Potter fanfic sock puppets being forced to have ads now. They care about ads being served on most of the popular Russian blogs made in the future.

As I said before the killing of free, no-ads accounts and the mysterious absence of popular interests for American LJers like 'sex' and 'depression' from the tag cloud in LJ's frontmatter prompted this content strike, this reminds me of something: it reminds me of what it was like to still be using an Amiga as my only computer after C= died and the Amiga IP got picked up by one company after another that had no clue about why the Amiga was ever so cool, or no clue about how to rekindle that coolness in a world dominated by Windows.

What makes LJ cool to you or I that's different from any other blogging service? Well, my bet is the combination of the friends page, the privacy system, and the comments.

It's really easy to make a list of people you read, and it's really easy to mark posts as public, visible to your whole friends list, visible to a subset of your friends list, or totally private. You might have an account that you almost never post in, that's solely for reading stuff; you might have a ton of locked posts and a single public 'friends-only' banner, you might have a ton of totally private posts, you might have nothing but public posts. Log in once and you see all of this stuff, as appropriate, no matter whose LJ you're looking at.

And the comments just kick the ass of everything else. Every other blogging program offers a simple list of comments, one after the other; we have these wonderful threaded discussions with tightly-targeted email updates. And a whole pile of icons to make it fun to look at and add another level to the discourse, if you want - most blogs, you're lucky if it has a plugin to grab a single icon from the usually-down gravatar service.

I can deal without LJ's other features; these are the ones that I miss every time I poke at blog packages.

So the question becomes: how can we leave LJ easily, and leave all this behind? How can we integrate this kind of fine-grained privacy across a shitload of individual sites; how can we make it as easy to set up? There's guides to giving Wordpress some of these features, but they all involve installing about ten plugins, and then hacking about until they actually work together. With the hideous default style. Getting it to work with another style is even worse. OpenID is a stab at making the login easy, but how do we get the whole privacy thing to really flow?

Me, I'm sitting here hacking about with Textpattern right now, looking at something that's starting to look a lot like my LJ. Thinking about how to make these functionality changes feel elegant.

because it's so juvenile

( NSFW )

LOOK, MA! I'M WEB 2.0!

This is protocat's fault.

edit: Crap, LJ stripped out the embedded style that would've stuck it on the upper right corner of your friends page!
edit edit: Hah, take that LJ, I put a line in my custom style's stylesheet just for this!