Charmian's Journal

Suggestion to make news-only LJ news comm. If you dislike the current news format at LJ, I guess you could try commenting here to express your opinion.

http://www.majordojo.com/2011/02/how-did-wordpress-win.php Why Wordpress became more popular than MT.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_state_of_web_spam_human-posted_spam_is_on_the.php

Via elena: Microsoft to shut down their Windows Live Spaces blogging site, allows users the option of moving to Wordpress.com.

A User's Guide to Websites, part 1: If it wasn't broken, why fix it?

I was also talking to someone who felt that SUP splitting LJ into Cyrillic (meaning mainly Russian and other languages using the cyrillic script) and non-Cyrillic services (mainly English) as a bad thing for users. However, I don't really agree. It makes sense to split them up, because the Russian-language and English usages of the site are so different, and because certain things which Russian (and other Cyrillic-script using languages) users like, might be disliked by the English language userbase, and we might have had even MORE drama. Also, some of the features for the Russian-speaking userbase are more useful when restricted only to journals which use a common language, such as 'popular posts' and 'top users.' [edited for clarity]

/goes back to reading very long book which they made an anime of. PG 400 w00t. Why do I read so slow in Japanese...

1. An interview with Matt Haughey, the creator of Metafilter, which, though it started out as a hobby, has enabled him to quit his day job and pay three employees.

The site's revenue model is not based off of membership fees (although now you do have to pay $5 to become a member, but that's more to control membership size), but off of advertisements, mostly in the AskMefi section. Members don't see ads, but people who stumble in via search engine or external links do.

2. In Praise of Online Obscurity

On how socializing doesn't scale.

"Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote....At a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun — but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting."

After reading the whole Give Me More Friends! Entitlement crise on LJ, it struck me that quite a few people on LJ do seem to believe that permanent account holders are sort of an aristocracy, deserving of special privileges. While paid account members certainly have certain features available to them, for the purposes of suggestions, what counts is the content of the suggestion, not the paid/non-paid status of the suggester; that is probably (IIRC) true for support as well, in that you still receive the same kind of support based on your problem, not based on your paid/non-paid status. Permanent accounts, due to their scarcity, have become a sort of status symbol on LJ, which I think leads to some negative social effects, as well as increased bitterness when LJ does something they don't like. I guess I'm not entirely sympathetic? Because I just think "eh, when you buy a permanent account, you are gambling with that cash. Also, if you have had it for over a certain amount of time, you already got your money's worth."

Oh yeah, if anyone does want an invite code, I have five to give away. I think most of the people I know on LJ who are interested already have one.

Some interesting links (previously posted at my tumblr):
http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability (Why open source often has poor usability)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-5MLPzRjls (Bollywood in the early eighties?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxDWpgKPPPs (Adorable owl)
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/the-future-of-book-manufacturing/