Charmian's Journal

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29

Damn. 73,000 blogs shut down because of the actions of just of a few of them? And the owner isn't able to get ANY data back?

In the recent LJ inactivity notification, there was a lot of talk about abandoned/inactive LJs that people wanted preserved. However, it seems to me that because of this kind of thing, and 'acts of god' (catastrophic technical failures), it's simply not enough to rely on the company alone to safeguard important data. If something is very important to you, archive it. Don't wait for disaster to threaten before you act.

Time for a poll: all are free to participate!

Yandex, the top Russian search engine, conducted a study of the Russian blogosphere. The study (PDF link), gives a fair amount of data on the various sites which make up the majority of the blogs there.

Some facts:

76% of active Russian blogs are hosted on four services: livejournal.com, blogs.mail.ru, ya.ru, and liveinternet.ru. Livejournal.com has the most active blogs. Blogs.mail.ru, however, has the most active communities.

The average Russian blogger on LJ is a 26 year old man.

In general, the number of unique visitors of all blogs is increasing faster than the number of active blogs.

Of the active participants in Russian LJ, 22% make only posts and 25% only comments (the rest do both)

Only 2% of Russian bloggers have more than 100 subscribers. 0.2% have more than 500.

Spam blogs increased dramatically in number over the last half of 2008.

I wonder how they compiled these stats? Also, it's interesting that LJ in Russia is not associate with youthful bloggers (other blogging services are). I wonder if as Wordpress.com starts to increase its translation capacities, whether it or other Wordpress MU sites will gain traction among the Russian audience.

I (try to) follow a simple rule when blog publicly. Am I okay with J. Random Internet User, inclusive of all individuals I have met or will ever meet on the internets under this identity, seeing this, connected to this username/domain name/identity? If I am, I post it. If not, I lock it, or post it in a secured place elsewhere, or discuss it in private with a friend.

I wouldn't go as far as saying, as in this comment, that people who do post to the internet this way "treat themselves as broadcast media" or wonder if "is this their entire life?" ( more than you wanted to know about my opinions of internet media, blogging vs. journaling, etc etc etc etc etc )

tl;dr aside, I think this is like how Youtube is full of moron comments (not that anyone who posts comments that an OP finds undesirable is a moron; but I mean, when anyone can comment, there is the possibility that anything will be commented). The internet is now a more popular place than ever, and if you wish to avoid moron comments or "the rampantly incivil" or whatever people who comment in ways you dislike, there has to be a gate of some sort.

I think also that public-ness of public blogging is an art, similar to being a public figure in general. As in all things, it's a skill that can be learned, and some who take to it naturally, and others to whom it comes with utmost difficulty. I see it as a subset of social skills, or perhaps it has aspects of being a 'politician' or a 'spin doctor.' (Although perhaps the correct word is more 'journalist' or 'author.')

Been thinking what to do with my domain. Maybe I could move the fandom stuff (mostly Saiunkoku) off to wp.com, and then axe the /log subdomain. Then I could start up a new blog for book reviews (reposting the old ones I put on my LJ). I also was thinking of trying out google adsense. Most of what I write about has little commercial value, if any, but perhaps there is some interest in writing about language learning? Or kanji.

I finished uploading the LJ journal to wordpress.com. To avoid people complaining about the importing of comments, I made the backup visible only by me. Maybe I should upload a backup of the entries only (no comments) to Dreamwidth as well; although, the appeal of uploading to a wordpress installation is that finally, people can search your blog, so maybe what I should do is re/up to WP.com and then abort the install when it starts doing all of the comments.

( rambling on my own blogging; probably boring to people who didn't read my LJ blog )

Actually, I think other blog services have really improved their privacy functions. LJ no longer is necessarily the only one that has locking functions. Both WPMU and Tumblr seem to have the functions of a "secret blog," although I haven't tried either one of them.

I wonder how a completely "secret blog" compares with an LJ style journal whose existence is public, even if its content can be private, or a journal which can have private and public sectors? Socially, what are the consequences? Well, one is that the "secret blog" is truly a black box (this is probably what some people truly WANT on LJ though, and actually, I can't think of any reasons not to give them it); its existence can't even be easily seen, especially because WPMU's private blogs allow you to automatically code all external links through a referral privatizer. I'm not sure about Tumblr's secret blogs because I haven't tried them out (anyone want to be invited to my test private tumblr?).

Whereas, with an LJ style code fork, you can't exclude yourself from the directory, nor can you privatize your profile page to a select group. However, the privacy of LJ is clearly visible, with all of the LJs that advertise their friends-lockedness. What would it be like if everyone had a public facing identity, with the option of creating a private facing one(s), which was totally invisible?

Buddypress seems to have developped further from when I last saw it. This is a mod of WPMU (wordpress multiuser) which allows social networking functions. In other words, I guess this means you can create something like ning.com. Buddypress has social networking features, like user profiles, private messaging, friends, commenting on things (the Wire), activity streams, seeing all of your comments/blogposts, etc., and people can also have their own blogs. Plus, they can form groups with their own forums. I'm not sure if they can also have group blogs or what kind of privacy features there are though.

What will the next iteration of social networking look like? What kinds of new features will it have? It's exciting to watch this develop.

There seem to be some interesting things going on in the DiSO world, but as a non-web-developer there's a lot that I don't understand and will need to read up on more. (like oAuth).