A Decade of LiveJournaling

[flwyd]

This week marks ten years I've been using LiveJournal. I joined on June 12th, 2001 at the recommendation of slyviolet (mlechan back then). I didn't get around to making my first post until the 16th though. This is my 1280th post; I've received 2364 comments and posted 4389 (there may be some overlap).

My postiest month was February, 2007 with 30 entries, better than when I was doing daily words the year before. I also managed 29 posts in January, 2004 when I'd graduated but hadn't yet started a salaried job. I've had a few months with only two posts, and this April I managed just one.

In the early days, the way you found an LJ post again was through memories, which is the easy way to find my erstwhile project of interest haiku. Since then, they've added per-post tags, which is a more streamlined way for me to find all the posts I've written about, say, unicode. The tag which probably hast the most interesting entries is shower meme, which is one of the best ideas to come out of LJ-land. There are also some nice posts about the economy, travel updates from China and Central America. My most popular tag is pun, but I still don't write them all down as my mom always insisted. (Of course, my mom doesn't read my LiveJournal, so she doesn't see the puns I do record.)

As I was randomly poking around posts in preparation for this one, I found a note from my school's tenth graduation:

I have a special reverence for ten year reflections, due to the line from Pink Floyd's song Time: And then one day you find / Ten years have got behind you / No one told you when to run / You missed the starting gun.

The web has changed a lot in the last ten years (half its life). LiveJournal was one of the first WWW social networks, and it's still my favorite, even though (or perhaps because) it hasn't kept up with all the trends of interactive web applications, arcane privacy, face tagging, and Like buttons littered throughout the web. Yet unlike many of these new-fangled things, it's open source, standards-supportive (RSS, OpenID, FOAF, etc.), easily-indexed, and JavaScript-optional. I can be as verbose as I want, mark up my posts with (almost) any HTML I want, write about anything I want, follow a threaded discussion, "friend" a stranger, pick my own name and photo, filter which friends I want to read, filter which friends can read me (even though I keep everything public), and throw as many links around as I want. So there :-P

In spring 2007, LiveJournal was as big as Facebook; as of summer 2010 its near neighbor was Tumblr. I've recently been less than frequent with updates, in part because my life's been pretty regular and in part because my social networking instincts are often satisfied at work by Buzz. But I intend to keep blogging here, and maybe some day I'll get back from a festival with enough energy to talk at length about my crazy adventures.

In a sense, I'm kind of glad that other sites have drawn away the users with short attention spans: my friends page these days has as high a signal-to-noise ratio as ever, full of posts by folks focused on thoughtful writing. When I come back from vacation, I make sure to catch up on email and LiveJournal; everything else can slip through the stream.

So hey, thanks for reading me all these years. And thanks for sharing your own words. Together we make a great place. And feel free to add tags to my old posts.

Comments

[grenacia.livejournal.com]

I wish I could find a tool that would tell me how long I've been LJ friends with someone. Or the dates we first commented on each other's journals. I have a lot of friends I first met on LJ, where I think it feels like I've known them longer than I think I actually have, but I'm not sure.

[flwyd.livejournal.com]

If you've got email notifications enabled and you don't delete email, you could search for their username and see how far back that goes.

[grenacia.livejournal.com]

I'm not using the same e-mail account or computer I was when I first started LJ. I still have a backup of old e-mail on a hard drive somewhere, but its not worth digging up for idle curiousity.

[477150n.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, on the signal to noise... though it puts more pressure to write something interesting, which is why I haven't posted in a couple of months.