MetaJournal

pasted

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:29:10 GMT

sto_vosem: a community of pictures of LJ users. Fantastic.

everyone's doing it

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 22:31:53 GMT

erik observes:

"Rumsfeld stepping down" is the new "I'm posting this via LJTalk."

another meta-joke

Wed, 31 May 2006 12:32:13 GMT

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: That's not funny!

anonymous confessions

Thu, 11 May 2006 01:42:00 GMT

I feel like the "anonymous confessions" phenomenon is closer to a real meme than the "what kind of [x] am I?" quiz (how did those end up getting called memes, anyway?). The idea is simple: someone turns off IP logging, and writes something like, "Please tell me a secret, anonymously."

I've seen it all over LJ, but apparently in the ucberkeley community this is a tradition. The spring confessions thread is nearing 3000 comments, some of which name names.

(See also: http://grouphug.us/, of course.)

how to be rich and famous

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 09:08:23 GMT

One of the top search results for [how to be rich and famous] happens to be this blog post. It has attracted thousands of visitors and a thousand comments from people, mostly preteens, seeking fame and arguing why they're deserving of it.

craigslist

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 07:22:30 GMT

Craigslist post: men seeking women: "my livejournal is boring".

meta sign

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 01:39:26 GMT

Via BoingBoing, a sign that warns you not to bump your head on it.

disaster porn

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 18:18:22 GMT

interdictor: live news from the streets of New Orleans.

(Update: Here's an article on Wired all about this LJ.)

Wired's 2019 collaborative crossword puzzle

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 22:39:50 GMT

LJ users collaboratively solve a crossword from the future, "found" in this month's Wired

[via singularity]

Girl on a bike: 5 years later

Wed, 06 Jul 2005 19:53:07 GMT

Today is a really special day for bloggers. It's the five year anniversary of the "girl on a bike" story. Back in 2000, when one could keep up with pretty much every A-list blog, Meg Hourihan and Jason Kotke (Blogger employees) each posted an identical (fictional) account of how seeing a girl riding a bike brought back (fictional) childhood memories.

Metafilter went nuts with theories, from "blogger glitch" to "secret code" (it also used to be possible/palatable to read all the metablogs). The fact was that nobody had seen anything like this before.

And then something unusual happened. Other people started posting the story. Tom Coates (the first Girl on a Bike copycat) droped the semantic bomb on all of us

It's not the chain letter, and the best thing about all of this is that it's not collusion either. It's just organic meme-growth. It looked like an interesting thing to do (post exactly the same thing as someone else - it was already replicated once when I saw it anyway), particularly as it is such a "personal" experience. When I came to it, and it was only on two sites, I already knew that I wasn't going to be able to tell which one of them had the "genuine experience" - and so I followed my instincts and decided that it being genuine was completely irrelevant. And so I posted it as well. Lots of other people obviously felt the same way, because it's all over the place now.

What followed was the sound of thousands of dictionaries opening. Few had ever heard the word "meme" before, and nobody had seen it applied to blogging. Hell, I didn't even learn how to pronounce it for another year.

Fast forward 5 years: blog usage has grown faster than exponentially, and the word "meme" has been diluted to mean "content you post that isn't original", such as questionaires and online personality tests.

It's fun to look back on the old days of blogging, when everyone was so wide-eyed and naive. People really opened their hearts so their readers could take a look inside. Every blogger had the same "coming of age", where they'd post something that hurt another person, and after the fallout they'd realize, "hey, what I blog about really does affect my meatspace life."

[x-posted from me]

more emotion

Tue, 24 May 2005 21:28:15 GMT

Random news article: "At the risk of being cliché, their set emitted more emotion than LiveJournal."

Aside from the terrible word choice ("emitted"?), does this mean "more emotion than LiveJournal" is a cliché?

jargon run amok

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 21:34:46 GMT

Blogspotting on Blog Visibility

Over at Blogspotting, the new Businessweek blog on blogging, ...

Not The Onion, but a real post.

See also Brad's friendster blog URL:
http://blogs.blogs.friendster.com/blogs_blogs_blogs/2005/03/blogs_blogs_blo.html

pictures of picturetakers

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 04:31:04 GMT

Also via Mako:

Today, Mika and I went to visit central park to see it under some freshly fallen snow. Rather than take pictures of the gates, which everybody does, we decided to (sneakily) take pictures of the people taking pictures of the gates.

We're calling the resulting photo-documentary Picturesque: Picture of Pictures of the Gates.

metanews

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 04:17:10 GMT

ABC News: 35,000 New Stories on Pope After Death. Or, as Ben points out, does that story itself make the number 35,001?

lj history

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 17:11:55 GMT

My friend Ryan, user #1674, wrote a history of LJ from his perspective on his five year LJ anniversary. It's sorta LJ history but, in true LJ style, also personal history. Back in the day we all got usernames like evan, patrick, carley, etc.

gothic lolitas

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 23:21:54 GMT

The New York Times comments on the "Gothic and Lolita fashion" phemonenon, and how the egl community feels about it.

Weblog Tools Market Share

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 20:47:31 GMT

Great article with lots of pretty graphs about the blogging market. With the acquisition of LJ, Six Apart has a 40% market share (LJ, Movable Type, Typepad). Google's Blogger is a close 2nd with 35%, but it's growing faster.

One interesting tidbit about the growth of blogs in general, which should make Moore pretty jealous: "Technorati has been showing a doubling of the blogs it tracks every 5 months or so, or 120% every 6 months."

you cannot escape livejournal

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 23:01:37 GMT

Cat and Girl make a comic about things being better pre-LiveJournal, which then shows up on LiveJournal.

livejournal outage

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 18:38:37 GMT

Open thread: post links to posts about LiveJournal being out below!

I'll start:
Slashdot, as usual, gets it all wrong.
Something Positive made a comic.

right now there's a 15 year old girl in WAY too much makeup sitting in her room crying

image: brad on the front page of the oregonian

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 19:01:04 GMT

lj sold

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 21:31:30 GMT

My thoughts on LJ's sale. (I hate linking to my own posts, but I think I have more info than most.)

Check out dailylj for some news articles, though I doubt they say much.

sa + lj

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 22:24:31 GMT

"Six Apart [...] acquisition of Danga Interactive Inc.'s LiveJournal blogging network. [...] The deal, which will be announced on Thursday, involves an undisclosed amount of cash and stock, eWEEK.com has confirmed."

I'll have more to say about this later.

murder as social gathering

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 03:38:14 GMT

People flock to online journal after 16-year-old's arraignment.

Not a story about the murder itself, but about the debacle the journal of the muderer became.

"It happened to me!"

Wed, 11 Aug 2004 20:28:11 GMT

Every once in a while, a personal story posted on LJ gets blogosphere-wide recognition. I've come across two such stories today:

yoshitsune accidentally gets removed from the voter list in a primary election [via daily kos]

mephron almost gets a fantasy novel taken away for "security reasons" [via boing boing]

and one a few weeks ago:

jiveturky gets flipped off by George W. Bush [via wonkette who calls the story "inconclusive"]

I'm not sure what to call these types of posts, but they're all first-hand anecdotes that are political in nature. I guess this isn't anything special: if enough people have an LJ, then a critical mass of related stories will obviously show up.

They all use LJ eventually

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 04:07:20 GMT

Via boingboing:

"Bondage-chICK" is a young, disturbed girl (she's a "cutter" who cuts herself to feel better), who stumbled across a free developers' journal service offered by perl.org and started using it for her personal diary. No problem, except that the developers who stumbled across her journal assumed that she was a perl bot ("If this is autogenerated, you need to tweak it so that the doubled+transposed letter mistake doesn't happen so often, and introduce some more naturalistic errors. If it's not autogenerated, you're really sad and about 18 months behind the curve.") or a gag. Of course, the whole thing might be a hoax. Or not. Link (via Waxy)

I guess the perl.org community talked her into moving her journal off their service because her final journal entry reads

afi_atreyufan is my screen name at livejournal.