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

[holyschist]

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

[charmian]

Heh, it's really not that complex.

http://www.tumblr.com/why-tumblr

I've also blogged about it before: http://charmian.dreamwidth.org/tag/tumblr

Somewhere in there is a guide I wrote to Tumblr, but it's kind of old and Tumblr has since added new features.

[holyschist]

Hmm, it may be my microblogging-ambivalent Twitter-ignoring self, but nothing stands out about it for me as dramatically different other than the lack of comments, which is a huge negative for me, and the "reblogging" culture, which is also kind of a huge negative for me. I think I'm just not their target user.

[charmian]

Well, there are 'replies,' and people often use reblogging as a form of commenting. On those two counts, then, probably you'd be more interested in Posterous, which has comments and doesn't have reblogs.

However, the reblogging DOES make a huge difference. It is also really easy to use it, and they don't have ads and let you use your own domain name for free, which makes it attractive to bloggers.

(Depends also what one is comparing Tumblr to, and also, there are the network effects)

[holyschist]

Yeah, it sounds like it's filling a niche. I could see using something similar for a photo blog, but I wouldn't be comfortable with reblogging my photos, so I'd probably choose something different.

But for something like, I dunno, a lower-drama Cute Overload, where you're curating photos and commenting isn't vital and may even be annoying, I could see Tumblr working really well.

[charmian]

It seems there are professional photogs on Tumblr; at least that's one of the promoted categories.

Yeah: it's also really good for those kinds of blogs because you don't need to formally join and post; instead, you can 'submit' things using a form should the owner wish, and then they can pick and choose from the submissions.