A New Purpose, a new direction, the same internet space
So after talking with a good number of my close friends I found out to my amazement that all of them still check LJ despite no long posting to it. Despite the initially apparent conundrum, some of it does make sense. It seems that at least a few of us have moved on to create personal blogs which are more in line with our style of blogging. A typical post for me, for example, was a photo with 5 or less sentences explaining it or talking about the experience related to it. As you can image, I have moved on to create my own photo blog which I do keep updated on a fairly regular basis. Similarly, Yoshi has his political/journalism link blog (The TPS Report) and Jeff has a poker blog. Perhaps we out grew LJ, perhaps it lacked the specific community we sought after, perhaps it was too restrictive, or perhaps it was just a fad.
Even though LJ seems as though it can no longer contain our exclusive personal interests you might think it would still be useful as a journal from a more personal viewpoint. I think, however, that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have replaced the need for these personal published journals. These social networking services provide the core personal information people seek along with the ease of constant updates and minimal time and effort required to maintain them. It takes a fair amount of time and effort to create a decent LJ post not to mention the time it would take a follow a great deal of them. LJ’s provide a depth of personal information that most people are not interested short of a few close friends. As such, your effective LJ community becomes limited to a few close friends, which presumably you know well enough to talk to on a semi-regular basis.
So why am I writing on LJ again you ask? The nature of my photo blog is to post photos which I cherish for their creative or technical demands. This leaves no room for personal snapshots and memories. Now Facebook does allow for the posting of such personal snapshots, but perhaps without a certain depth of personal memory attached to said photos or just the memories themselves. So I suppose what I am saying is that my posts here will be primarily for my own benefit; to remember things which I enjoy. If you, being my close friends, choose to share in these memories more in depth you are welcome. In addition to these memories I will occasionally use this journal to post photos which I don’t believe to be up to the quality of my photoblog, but are none the less interesting, such as yesterday’s post. If you want to follow a blog that I update with a degree of regularity and enthusiasm you will have to follow my photo blog. I may cross post some of the photos I am especially proud of here occasionally, as a recent summary of my real blog, but I will make no promises since I usually distain cross posting because it defeats the purpose of having two separate blogs.
Even though LJ seems as though it can no longer contain our exclusive personal interests you might think it would still be useful as a journal from a more personal viewpoint. I think, however, that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have replaced the need for these personal published journals. These social networking services provide the core personal information people seek along with the ease of constant updates and minimal time and effort required to maintain them. It takes a fair amount of time and effort to create a decent LJ post not to mention the time it would take a follow a great deal of them. LJ’s provide a depth of personal information that most people are not interested short of a few close friends. As such, your effective LJ community becomes limited to a few close friends, which presumably you know well enough to talk to on a semi-regular basis.
So why am I writing on LJ again you ask? The nature of my photo blog is to post photos which I cherish for their creative or technical demands. This leaves no room for personal snapshots and memories. Now Facebook does allow for the posting of such personal snapshots, but perhaps without a certain depth of personal memory attached to said photos or just the memories themselves. So I suppose what I am saying is that my posts here will be primarily for my own benefit; to remember things which I enjoy. If you, being my close friends, choose to share in these memories more in depth you are welcome. In addition to these memories I will occasionally use this journal to post photos which I don’t believe to be up to the quality of my photoblog, but are none the less interesting, such as yesterday’s post. If you want to follow a blog that I update with a degree of regularity and enthusiasm you will have to follow my photo blog. I may cross post some of the photos I am especially proud of here occasionally, as a recent summary of my real blog, but I will make no promises since I usually distain cross posting because it defeats the purpose of having two separate blogs.