LJ sold...

[juliet]

In case anyone's missed it, LJ's been sold. To Six Apart (who run MoveableType etc etc). Post from Mena of Six Apart, Six Apart FAQ.

All the above links emphasise that no changes are planned, LJ isn't going anywhere, etc etc. It should be noted that LJ's been a private company for a good while now; moving ownership to another private company who are also involved in blogging, recognise the different strengths of LJ & MoveableType, and are smallish with no immediate indications of Evil, isn't necessarily a big deal.

Those of you in cynical mode may wish to back up your LJ (I shall be; but then I've been meaning to anyway for ages): various tools available.

Update: although two of those are Win-only, and I wasn't able to get the third to work first time (& now have to wait an hr to try again due to their caching system). Anyone got any Linux/Mac archiving tool suggestions?

Oh yes, & apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers. How bizarre. The main reason I prefer LJ is the Friends page meaning that I don't have to keep checking through a huge list of bookmarks for new content. I can see no huge religious war here.

Comments

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

*shrugs*

I have no idea why people are getting so over-excited about this. Like you say, LJ has been a private company for a while. That it's now owned by a different private company doesn't make any immediate difference to me at all.

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Also movable type have a good rep - maybe LJ will stop being the stunted blog-child of 13 yr old goths and carsmilesteve, eh? :)

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Never! 13 year old goths and carsmiles need an online home too!

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

Dude, diaryland exists for THAT kind of thing.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

What's that? Dairyland? Some sort of blog for MILK?</kchu>

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Er, www.livejournal.com/export.bml ?

s'what I use anyway. I agree and am just about to post so, with one caveat.

[juliet]

But that's only a month at a time = kerfuffle. And doesn't do comments.

BTW, it is the 6th today, so you should change your default back to non-Christmas one FORTHWITH.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Well yes, I suppose there is the comments thing.

Default icon? I don't know what you're talking about...

[juliet]

:-P

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I like the sound of these 'Super Robots'.

I bet they have names like DESTRUCT-O-TRON and MEGA-POWER-BOT. Cool.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I, for one, welcome our new Super Robot overlords.

[karen2205]

A lot of people are trying to take journal back ups right now for precisely this reason making all the tools slow/prone to crashing. I'm going to do the same, though I doubt I'll get a chance till the weekend, hopefully by that point everyone will have calmed down a bit. You might find http://www.livejournal.com/users/pne/398187.html helpful - I've not had a chance to look into any of the stuff Philip's suggested but he's fairly geeky so I imagine there'll be something helpful there. lj_nifty is a good place to look in general for things like this, but bear in mind that a lot of the tools there haven't been properly tested and do weird things - eg. some turn your journal friends only tools caused people to lose lots of entries.

I think the big divide is centred around how LJ is more of a community rather than lots of people all doing their own thing in the same place. It's designed to make talking to other people easy, rather than interaction with other users being a mere sideline. But yes, I don't think the divide is anywhere near as big as people are suggesting.

[rillaith.livejournal.com]

I think the big divide is centred around how LJ is more of a community rather than lots of people all doing their own thing in the same place.

I think you've hit the nail square on the head, and that's precisely why they have bought LJ. As Brad described it, LJ is an inward looking "blogging" community, and MovableType / "blogs" are primarily outward facing. There is a difference, and this puts Six Apart in a strong business position of spanning both sides of the "blogging" / journal community as a whole.

[karen2205]

Yep, it's not really in their interests to do things to LJ that cause the userbase to move elsewhere eg. by altering the ethos of the site too much.

"apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers"

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

On the first night of my holiday I met a friend-of-friend at a party who shook my hand when he learned I documented my life online, but then withdrew his handshake once he found out I meant LJ. He was doing this in a jocular sense, but it wasn't entirely a joke. I think it's just the sort of internecine one-upmanship which any subculture breeds against others who, to the outside eye, are indistinguishable.

Re: "apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers"

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

The standard line is that all LJers are goths and/or angsty teenagers. Sadly, this stereotype is not entirely unreasonable. Hit the random button a few times and you do come across an awful lot of teenage angst and hairdye.

Re: "apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers"

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

True. It's not as if such types are unknown elsewhere in blogland, though...

Re: "apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers"

[djm4]

Sadly, this stereotype is not entirely unreasonable.

As with any stereotype, though, applying it to an individual person without any evidence that they fit it is a bit lazy.

Re: "apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers"

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Well, yes.

Re: "apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers"

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Yes, but for the most part, they don't do any harm to those of us who aren't interested. Live and let live, eh?

Re: "apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers"

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Well, I wasn't exactly suggesting that we hunt them down with dogs.

[mzdt.livejournal.com]

The main reason I prefer LJ is the Friends page

agreed - I always assumed for mt/wordpress etc bloggers there was some easy way of having a friends page using rss feeds - is that what 'blogroll' does? - but the friends page is the main thing for me - in fact by having myself as a friend I virtually never look as my actual journal...

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

LiveJournal has RSS feeds, and presumably other blogs do, so an RSS reader could work as a more flexible "friends page" (in that you can read from other journal sites). But I'm not sure how well things like friends only entries work - the RSS reader in Opera can see these entries, but obviously you need to sign up for an account, and at least with LiveJournal you only have to do that once, as opposed to getting an account for every blog you visit because it's on a different site (and I don't know if standalone blogs even allow anything like restricted/private entries).

I'm not sure if there's any standard way to authenticate/login with RSS either - with the Opera RSS reader it just works because I'm logged in with Opera, but I don't know if a standalone RSS reader would work here.

Another issue is commenting - if I have to open my browser and go to the web page to make any comments, I might as well stick with the Friends page system.

[juliet]

I use the Livejournal syndication feed thingy to basically use it as an RSS reader (although only for the blogs of friends who have non-LJ blogs - too much traffic from stuff like the Guardian or BBC RSS feeds).

[al-bullit.livejournal.com]

I use jbackup.pl (Perl based, so works on anything that has perl).

http://cvs.livejournal.org/browse.cgi/livejournal/src/jbackup/jbackup.pl

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, & apparently there's some kind of Big Divide between LJers & webbloggers.

Yeah, I hate this stereotyping of there being some great difference between the two. Of course, people who want to write a journal, communicate with friends, possibly with friends only entries, are more likely to be drawn to something like LJ, where as someone who has something important to say to the world that people will make an effort to visit his website might prefer a standalone "blog".

But I've seen plenty of people who run a journal on their own website (of course hardly anyone actually reads them, and I never look back after they first tell me of the site), and there are people whose LJs get read by a large number of strangers (ie, who read purely for the content and not because they are friends at all, in the same way that standalone blogs are supposedly used for).

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

Ooh, those links are really useful, but I wonder if any of them will work with non-public posts?

[juliet]

Think they all should - they'll ask you for your password. (if you're worried about security, change it afterwards, or change it to something temporary while you do the backup)