No band left on the bandwagon...
Still blogging? FYI: It's old news
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/story/C3BB2969FC0EEC48862576D70012374B?OpenDocument
You don't say? Lol. It was old news a couple years ago, about the time I started. I hopped on the LJ bandwagon well after it had peaked. But I dig it here, so I'm staying. There is no keyboard catharsis in 140 characters, or in a game of Farmville.
When the deepest, most empathic reply available consists simply of stabbing the *like* button, I get bored. I get no insights into your soul, nor you into mine, if we simply tell each other what we had for dinner. Reading people's LJ's... especially the ones where people are spilling their guts in a 'dear diary' fashion... is fascinating and heartwarming to me.
I can easily spend hours reading a day-to-day update of a couple year slice of somebody's life, and I have. I've been given wonderful and surprising insights into my RL friends lives, simply because I've had a chance to read their back story. On this faceless screen with its double-edged sword of anonymity... they spilled their guts... as have I. TMI, you say? For a face-to-face conversation with somebody you barely know, yeah. Certainly. But this isn't face to face. The rules about sharing are a bit different here, and I'm glad they are. The world could use a bit more empathy, I think.
LJ is very much my version of Callahan's Place.... a mythical bar dreamed up by Spider Robinson where "shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased, and thus do we refute entropy."
And as for writing instead of reading, this is my place to say what I want, as much as I want, about anything I want, and then toss my glass into the fireplace. On Facebook, I don't have the room, or the "semi-vetted" friends list, to comfortably spill that much info. And whether anybody else reads it.... 'meh... that's not horribly important to me. Simply pounding it out on the keyboard, then tossing it into the great electronic void, that's the catharsis on the outgoing side of my LJ.
So, I'll send an occassional tweet, and I'll keep up with various goings-on with my friends on Facebook (or whatever new social networking fad comes down the pike a year from now), but I've got a feeling I'm not going to be leaving LJ any time soon, whether it's trendy or not.