Charmian's Journal

1) Is it just me, or does it seem like everyone these days on LJ is friends-locking their journal? Not that I'm not the same (the new journal is going to be most impersonal and topical, thus unlocked. However, I locked the more personal journal.)

Although it does make it harder to figure out whether an unknown person is worth friending or not, in some ways you could say it's a positive sign, that people are finally figuring out that if they don't want The World to go seeing their journal, for whatever reason, the very sensible, normal thing to do is to make it friends-locked. Posting for The World is a different mentality from posting for The Friendslist, and it's good to see that people are possibly increasingly realizing this, thus leading to some containment of drama.

2) http://blackbeardblog.tumblr.com/post/205141856/five-reasons-you-should-delete-positive-comments

Provocative post on why bloggers should delete positive comments (that do not contribute to discussion or do not add relevant content). Hmm... I'd say that deleting is likely to offend the commenters, and make them mad for no good reason. Also, having comments, even of the contentless kind, is often used by a metric for readers to determine whether a post is worth reading or not. What is needed, then, in my opinion, is either a comment sorting system, so that the cream rises to the top (comments are either ratable, or comments that are responded to rise up), or for alternate feedback mechanisms to be promoted. Sharing is one, and another a ratings/like system.

Tumblr and Posterous get the liking mechanism down right, IMHO. A small, but conspicuous place where you can register your approval of a post. They also use it as a bookmarking system, but that works less well because there is a lack of hierarchy (in other words, you can't tag your bookmarks).