4 ms·

Blogging has transformed and moved. Twitter is a kind of blogging--only more concise, and consequently, much easier. Facebook, as well as Linkedin, may scratch

Blogging has transformed and moved. Twitter is a kind of blogging--only more concise, and consequently, much easier. Facebook, as well as Linkedin, may scratch the same itch as blogging. And, the bonus is that your content is much more visible and accessible. Even if you post a link to your blog on linkedin, maybe 5-10% of people will click it, from my experience. This is mostly a response to the comments, saying that blogging for sake of blogging has been lost. I don't think it's been lost; it's moved and transformed into social media.

scottlocklin 8y ago
Twitter is the comments section most media outlets have removed. Media likes it because it's usually all about them, and screencapping it often makes their jobs easier (aka "look at this twitter thread" between X and Y). Otherwise, it's disqus with a different distribution model. Blogs are doing just fine. LJ simply became a Russian blog platform rather than and English language one. It did have some social media aspects back in the day, but it assumed a couple of standard deviation higher IQ (or at least attention span) in its users, favoring long form posts with lots of imagery. It didn't become a disgusting FB megacorp because it didn't cater to the lowest common denominator, or hire people to make it addictive. FWIIW Brad did fine. Tools like this should be the goal, not evil garbage like FB.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Media likes it because it's usually all about them, and screencapping it often makes their jobs easier I hate how true this can be. "The internet is furious at celebrity" Article sources the entirety of two mildly annoyed nobodies on twitter.
mprev 8y ago
The comment about "blogging for the sake of blogging" (it would've provided better context if you'd replied to that, btw) made the comment that what we have now is mostly content marketing and self promotion. I don't see how pointing at social media refutes that.
smacktoward 8y ago
Twitter is blogging with all the good things about blogging stripped out. This did indeed make it easier, in the sense that just bleating whatever happens to be in your head, or venting insta-reactions to whatever happens to be passing in front of your eyes, are always going to be easier than thinking hard and crafting an argument. The result of all that ease and accessibility is a cesspool that has damaged lives, the culture, and arguably democracy itself. Seeing Twitter described as an improved, evolved form of blogging is like seeing someone awful peel the skin off the body of your dear friend and wear it as a suit.
JohnBooty 8y ago
Even if you post a link to your blog on linkedin, maybe 5-10% of people will click it, from my experience. Well, that's what was cool about LJ. LJ was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts. The latter of those two aspects (and the fact that it was aggregated with the former) is what made it unique.
- amyjess 8y ago
  Yeah, when I was in college, I self-hosted a Serendipity blog (and a NewsPro/Coranto blog before that) for a while before moving to LJ, and I moved because of LJ's social aspects. Having that friends list was a huge benefit, as was being able to use <lj user="foobar"> to tag my friends in posts. Plus, I'd have access to communities! Social is important. And eventually, around the time I graduated college, I stopped using LJ and started using Facebook for everything I used LJ before because the social interface was even better. Actually, I'd been using Facebook for a few years before I stopped using LJ, but in the early days of FB, it wasn't really suitable as a blogging platform. My timeline was basically - 2003: I started college, decided to self-host a NewsPro blog on the LAN for my freshman-year roommates (freshman apartments at UTD at the time were four-bedroom units with randomly-assigned roommates... UTD didn't have dorms until after I graduated) and I to share stuff with each other. Halfway through my freshman year, I upgraded the blog to Coranto. - 2004: Freshman year ended, roommates and I all went our separate ways. I ended up living alone in a one-bedroom. I briefly considered putting the Coranto blog on the public Internet as a solo blog, but I ultimately decided to start fresh and self-host a Serendipity blog for myself (and I chose s9y because I was teaching myself Postgres at the time). - early 2005: Facebook came to my college, and I jumped on it in the first week (I was user #462 at UTD, and I know this because before usernames were a thing, you accessed someone's profile by a combination of their college and their number at that college... I was utdallas.facebook.com user 000462). - late 2005: I got jealous of all my friends using LiveJournal, so I signed up for an account. I basically stopped updating the s9y blog, though I kept it around. I think I intended to keep updating both, but then one of the officers in the campus LUG that I was a part of decided to set up a Planet instance for us, and since I could only add one of my blogs, I just told him to add the LJ one, and I basically forgot about the s9y blog. - 2007: I graduated college and basically stopped using LJ. It was a combination of things: more of my friends were on FB than LJ, and FB had picked up a significant amount of blogging features by then, including status updates, notes, the ability to share links, and even the ability to put personality quizzes in boxes on your profile (and yes, personality quizzes were a large part of LJ's meme culture... in hindsight, it's kind of embarrassing, but whatever). From that point on, I'd log in to LJ and post once every few months, and then after a while it was a year before I logged in to write something new, and I didn't want to admit it, but I let my LJ die. Also, at that point, I switched my Facebook account from "visible to anyone in my networks" to "visible to friends only". From that point on, I was starting to care more about my social media presence, and I'd only consider going to LJ if I really wanted to make something public (yes, you can make friends-only posts on LJ, but I'd decided that I'd put my friends-only stuff on FB and my public stuff on LJ... and by then I had little I wanted to say to the public). - Late 2008: After a particularly awful Facebook redesign, I got a Twitter account and deactivated my Facebook account. - Late 2009: After being on Twitter for almost exactly a year, my phone died, so I "temporarily" came back to FB to gather phone numbers, and I found that Facebook had been redesigned again to be less awful, so I ended up staying on Facebook. Shortly after I decided to stay, I made my tweets private and basically abandoned that Twitter account. - 2011: Someone I had a phone interview with mentioned that he found my LJ and made a joke about my drinking habits. I logged in one last time to run a script to make my whole LJ friends-only and threw in an "everything here is outdated" line on my LJ bio. Since then, I've touched Twitter a couple more times with a few different accounts, but I haven't been a heavy Twitter user because the Twitter ecosystem is just so damn toxic (my current account was created for the sole purpose of DMing with a single friend who I met on Reddit and wanted to stay in contact with after I killed my Reddit account; I don't tweet from it, and I don't follow anyone other than my friend). Other than that, everything has been Facebook.

scottlocklin 8y ago

Twitter is the comments section most media outlets have removed. Media likes it because it's usually all about them, and screencapping it often makes their jobs easier (aka "look at this twitter thread" between X and Y). Otherwise, it's disqus with a different distribution model. Blogs are doing just fine. LJ simply became a Russian blog platform rather than and English language one. It did have some social media aspects back in the day, but it assumed a couple of standard deviation higher IQ (or at least attention span) in its users, favoring long form posts with lots of imagery. It didn't become a disgusting FB megacorp because it didn't cater to the lowest common denominator, or hire people to make it addictive. FWIIW Brad did fine. Tools like this should be the goal, not evil garbage like FB.

dvtrn 8y ago
Media likes it because it's usually all about them, and screencapping it often makes their jobs easier I hate how true this can be. "The internet is furious at celebrity" Article sources the entirety of two mildly annoyed nobodies on twitter.

mprev 8y ago

The comment about "blogging for the sake of blogging" (it would've provided better context if you'd replied to that, btw) made the comment that what we have now is mostly content marketing and self promotion. I don't see how pointing at social media refutes that.

smacktoward 8y ago

Twitter is blogging with all the good things about blogging stripped out. This did indeed make it easier, in the sense that just bleating whatever happens to be in your head, or venting insta-reactions to whatever happens to be passing in front of your eyes, are always going to be easier than thinking hard and crafting an argument. The result of all that ease and accessibility is a cesspool that has damaged lives, the culture, and arguably democracy itself. Seeing Twitter described as an improved, evolved form of blogging is like seeing someone awful peel the skin off the body of your dear friend and wear it as a suit.

JohnBooty 8y ago

Even if you post a link to your blog on linkedin, maybe 5-10% of people will click it, from my experience. Well, that's what was cool about LJ. LJ was both a blogging platform and an aggregated feed of your LJ friends' blog posts. The latter of those two aspects (and the fact that it was aggregated with the former) is what made it unique.

amyjess 8y ago
Yeah, when I was in college, I self-hosted a Serendipity blog (and a NewsPro/Coranto blog before that) for a while before moving to LJ, and I moved because of LJ's social aspects. Having that friends list was a huge benefit, as was being able to use <lj user="foobar"> to tag my friends in posts. Plus, I'd have access to communities! Social is important. And eventually, around the time I graduated college, I stopped using LJ and started using Facebook for everything I used LJ before because the social interface was even better. Actually, I'd been using Facebook for a few years before I stopped using LJ, but in the early days of FB, it wasn't really suitable as a blogging platform. My timeline was basically - 2003: I started college, decided to self-host a NewsPro blog on the LAN for my freshman-year roommates (freshman apartments at UTD at the time were four-bedroom units with randomly-assigned roommates... UTD didn't have dorms until after I graduated) and I to share stuff with each other. Halfway through my freshman year, I upgraded the blog to Coranto. - 2004: Freshman year ended, roommates and I all went our separate ways. I ended up living alone in a one-bedroom. I briefly considered putting the Coranto blog on the public Internet as a solo blog, but I ultimately decided to start fresh and self-host a Serendipity blog for myself (and I chose s9y because I was teaching myself Postgres at the time). - early 2005: Facebook came to my college, and I jumped on it in the first week (I was user #462 at UTD, and I know this because before usernames were a thing, you accessed someone's profile by a combination of their college and their number at that college... I was utdallas.facebook.com user 000462). - late 2005: I got jealous of all my friends using LiveJournal, so I signed up for an account. I basically stopped updating the s9y blog, though I kept it around. I think I intended to keep updating both, but then one of the officers in the campus LUG that I was a part of decided to set up a Planet instance for us, and since I could only add one of my blogs, I just told him to add the LJ one, and I basically forgot about the s9y blog. - 2007: I graduated college and basically stopped using LJ. It was a combination of things: more of my friends were on FB than LJ, and FB had picked up a significant amount of blogging features by then, including status updates, notes, the ability to share links, and even the ability to put personality quizzes in boxes on your profile (and yes, personality quizzes were a large part of LJ's meme culture... in hindsight, it's kind of embarrassing, but whatever). From that point on, I'd log in to LJ and post once every few months, and then after a while it was a year before I logged in to write something new, and I didn't want to admit it, but I let my LJ die. Also, at that point, I switched my Facebook account from "visible to anyone in my networks" to "visible to friends only". From that point on, I was starting to care more about my social media presence, and I'd only consider going to LJ if I really wanted to make something public (yes, you can make friends-only posts on LJ, but I'd decided that I'd put my friends-only stuff on FB and my public stuff on LJ... and by then I had little I wanted to say to the public). - Late 2008: After a particularly awful Facebook redesign, I got a Twitter account and deactivated my Facebook account. - Late 2009: After being on Twitter for almost exactly a year, my phone died, so I "temporarily" came back to FB to gather phone numbers, and I found that Facebook had been redesigned again to be less awful, so I ended up staying on Facebook. Shortly after I decided to stay, I made my tweets private and basically abandoned that Twitter account. - 2011: Someone I had a phone interview with mentioned that he found my LJ and made a joke about my drinking habits. I logged in one last time to run a script to make my whole LJ friends-only and threw in an "everything here is outdated" line on my LJ bio. Since then, I've touched Twitter a couple more times with a few different accounts, but I haven't been a heavy Twitter user because the Twitter ecosystem is just so damn toxic (my current account was created for the sole purpose of DMing with a single friend who I met on Reddit and wanted to stay in contact with after I killed my Reddit account; I don't tweet from it, and I don't follow anyone other than my friend). Other than that, everything has been Facebook.