Results of The Poll, and is "liking" coming to LJ?

[charmian]

So, last entry I had a poll, and from the poll, I make the following interpretations:

1. The vast majority of people who answered the poll post on DW on a regular basis. I was somewhat surprised, as I thought there would be more lurkers (or readers/commenters only), but apparently not.

2. I was also somewhat surprised to see that so few people posted to LJ original material, and that so many cross-posted. I had thought that there would be more people only commenting/reading on LJ for some reason.

3. Self hosted WP is the most popular blogging option, and when you add in wordpress.com, WP in general is the clear winner. However, Tumblr was much stronger than I expected it to be, which surprised me; it seems to me that not much attention has been paid to the rise of Tumblr in LJ social media discussion circles (IME). Other LJ clones were also popular.

Oh well, was anyone surprised by the poll results?

In other news, looking on changelog, I see that LJ may be putting in Google Analytics and also adding an "I like" feature.

[links to "I like":
http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8257370.html
http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8244377.html
http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8244199.html ]

[links to Google analytics:
http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8210044.html
http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/8209487.html ]


I wonder if the Google analytics feature for personal journals will be a paid-only feature, or whether it'll be also offered to basic/plus users. If it is allowed for free users, this has some potential to alter user behavior on LJ, as people now will have some metrics of pageviews, and also have referrer data. LJ offering stats including referrers is long overdue, IMHO, and Google Analytics integration is a cheap feature offered by many of LJ's competitors, such as Tumblr, so this really does seem like an easy way to give customers a useful feature.

As for "I like," I'm not really sure what it is (can anyone who codes offer any insight into the mechanics of it?) It seems to be a 'props' system where readers can say they 'like' a post, and the journal owner can see who 'liked' it, and it appears that this function can be enabled/disabled.

I'm wondering if the information on how many 'likes' a post gets, and who 'liked' it will be publicly available by default, and whether, like Tumblr, LJ will make your 'likes' an RSS feed which you can potentially make public. Anyway, I've been long in favor of the 'liking' system, and think it can be potentially quite an asset to a blogging system.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

I am just waiting for certain sections of the userbase to hear about the new "like" feature and melt like the wicked witch of the west in a rain shower with repulsion.

[miome]

I would click 'Like' on the 'Like' feature. ;-) To me it reduces clutter. There's plenty of posts, esp. on fan communities, with lots of comments that are just 'I like this!' or 'Win!'. I'd rather see '50 people like this post', rather than click on '50 comments' only to find them pretty content-free. ( Not that I'm saying people shouldn't give appreciation to posters - just the contrary! I'd like to make it easier to do that. )

[holyschist]

I don't really know what Tumblr is--I found their site kind of vague beyond "it's blogging! it's easy!"

[azurelunatic]

There have been some suggestions discussions on the topic. Many of them have been interesting.

The best one came out with the idea for an automatic header and footer, and a new poll format, so one could set up "like/dislike" if one wanted, or "awesomesauce/send in the velociraptors/i do not like peas"

[https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkOyl1joEdhQV7M0607hGLvOXzk46RjqCY]

blah blah blah testing

[http://www.google.com/profiles/worldserpent]

google/u/worldserpent

Liking introduced, sky doesn't fall

[fiddlingfrog.livejournal.com]

Check out the latest news post (http://news.livejournal.com/126772.html) on LJ.
+1: We've introduced a '+1' button on (http://community.livejournal.com/lj_photophile/profile)lj_photophile (http://community.livejournal.com/lj_photophile/) to help select photos for the weekly polls. We're eager to get your input on this new rating tool! Please comment on the latest photo poll (http://community.livejournal.com/lj_photophile/900737.html) to let us know what you think.
Digging through the Core 1 source it appears this is the like feature that's been in development for so long. I've got to say that this was a really subtle rollout.