A first visit to LiveJournal's homepage feels a bit like walking in on an inside joke. There's a lot to take in, plenty of features that appear worth checking out, and a picture of a goat. A first-time blogger will almost certainly feel his head spinning. Where other beginner-level blogging services, such as Vox and Blogger, tout their ease of use ("Create a blog in three easy steps," says Blogger; "Design it in a flash," proclaims Vox), LiveJournal's current incarnation has focused its attention elsewhere.
After you've signed up for an account, you'll find little of the step-by-step guidance offered by Vox and Blogger. Instead, LiveJournal (or LJ, as it's known by the "blognoscenti") dumps you into the thick of things, offering not much beyond the requisite FAQ. Although it's possible to set up your blog without knowing any code, starting out may prove bewildering for those who have yet to take their first step into the content-creation side of the blogosphere. The "Welcome to LiveJournal" page offers five options (though there are many others you'll discover eventually): Edit Profile, Find Other, Upload Userpics, Customize Journal, and Post to Journal.
I decided to begin by editing my profile. When LJ was founded in 1999, it set itself apart from other blogging services by incorporating social-networking features, and, indeed, filling out the app's profile feature feels a lot like getting started on a social-networking site such as MySpace or Friendster. The profile page includes fields for Interests, Bio, Location, and various forms of contact, including IM, Skype, and text-messaging, just the kinds of things you'd find on sites designed specifically for meeting new friends and keeping in contact with existing ones. Indeed, connecting with other people is an important feature of LJ, which straddles the space between Blogger and MySpace. The Upload Userpic option prompts you to upload images to accompany your profile both on your blog and when you participate in other activities on the site, such as commenting on friend's journals—which is what you'll likely spend a lot of time doing if you buy into the LJ vision of the blogosphere.
The Find Others option lets you locate other users based on similar interests. You can view their journals and then decide whether or not to add them as friends. You can also categorize Friends into headings such as School and Online Friends, each with its own color, to help further identify them on your home page. You can also opt to have the service notify you of all "friended" journal updates.
The Customize Journal link allows you to change your journal's layout, offering one option for those more familiar with Web code (which LJ calls S1), and another for the less Web-savvy (S2). S1 is one of the main ways in which the parent company, Six Apart, sets LiveJournal apart from its recently launched blog service, Vox. With S1, advanced users get more ways to customize their blogs, beyond what might be perceived as hand-holding on the part of the app. Those using S1 can take a more hands-on approach to design, by making changes directly to their blogs using HTML or CSS code. You'll need to have some clue about what you're doing to make it work for you, however.
If the code-it-yourself approach doesn't appeal to you, choosing the less complex S2 design option gives you some 30-plus templates to work with, some of which were borrowed from VOX. Themes let users further adjust the color scheme of their templates. The last option, Mood Icons, allows you to assign emoticons—when making posts, users can specify the mood that accompanies the text. Those who opt into paid accounts, which range from $3 a month to $19.95 a year, have even more customization options. Though the templates and ten additional themes are good for getting started (and certainly a big improvement over the dozen or so offered by Blogger), the AJAX-based instantaneous drag-and-drop customization offered by Vox (and to a lesser extent, Blogger) is sorely absent from the proceedings. It's a tradeoff: LJ's more advanced coding options aren't available in the more beginner-focused VOX.
Posting to the site is straightforward. There are fields for subject and body text. The latter features options for both HTML and WYSIWYG input, which allows those unfamiliar with code to change text style, post links and images, and even embed media with a few mouse clicks. Below the body-text field are fields for tags (which help categorize posts), mood, location, and the music that you're currently listening to. Users can also disable or screen comments and limit who can see the blog, making it visible to the public at large, friends only, custom groups of friends, or just the blog's author. According to one LiveJournal representative, nearly a quarter of all the site's posts are protected by some level of privacy. That may be a surprising portion to those who view blogging as all exhibitionism, all the time. It's also a clear sign of the importance of community in the LiveJournal world.—Next: It Takes a Village
It Takes a Village
Community is where LiveJournal truly shines, and though Vox has done an impressive job incorporating and improving upon some of LJ's social-networking features, Six Apart's newer blog tool can't yet touch LiveJournal's giant base of devoted users. In fact, according to LJ representatives, the reason that the site has not undergone a major overhaul, despite Six Apart's launching of what is, in essence, a shiny new version of the program, is mostly LiveJournal's commitment to, and understanding of, this user base. In April 2006, the site began to offer its Plus service, entitling unpaid users to many of the Premium features, in exchange for ad placement on their blogs (at the bottom, via Google AdSense). As a result, the site's feedback pages experienced a deluge of complaints on the part of longtime members.
Since then, updates have occurred more incrementally. Web 2.0 implementation has been limited to a few hover-over menus. Other newer features, such as Mobile Posting, Voice Posting, Text Messaging, and the site's new Jabber-based IM system, have been carefully designed to not affect the way longtime users post. For those who want the full Web 2.0 experience and decide to make the jump to Vox, Six Apart makes the transition easy, allowing users with VOX accounts to "cross-post" onto their LiveJournal account, essentially posting entries on both sites. This gives VOX adopters the ability to maintain their LiveJournal friends/readership.
While LiveJournal does offer options for users who want to publish their blog to external URLs or syndicate them as RSS feeds, the bulk of the journals created through the service seems to be intended for consumption by fellow LiveJournal users. Many blogs are the product of multiple authors—what LJ refers to as Communities. One massively popular site, the celebrity blog, Oh No They Didn't, has received some 25 million hits since September 2005, according to the site's counter. The blog's content is the product of the more than 45,000 members.
The site's support page is largely run by user volunteers. Users are also called upon to update the FAQs and school database and to translate large portions of the text into different languages. All the user-provided content gives LiveJournal an overall wiki-like feel. Even the site's mascot, a goat named Frank, has a large fan base among users, including his own blog and a regular comic about his exploits.—Next: Live and Let Live
Live and Let Live
There's a lot to take in on your first log-in to LiveJournal. The site is an interconnected community, with an active user-base numbering in the millions. It's like visiting a foreign country for the first time: Its inhabitants have their own language, customs, and points of reference, and attempting full immersion can be intimidating.
For those looking to merely dip a toe into the world of blogging for the very first time, Vox is a safer bet. MySpace and Friendster also offer LiveJournal-like blogging features in the context of their large social-networking programs, which should serve those more interested in community than in regular blog updates. If you're aching to make the simultaneous leap into both worlds, and you have a little bit of background in each, then by all means sign up for LiveJournal and don't look back.
More Blogging and RSS Software reviews:
• Feedly (for Android)
• Feedspot
• Digg (for iPad)
• Digg (for iPhone)
• Digg Reader
• more
LiveJournal : Getting Started
LiveJournal : Style System
LiveJournal : Templates
LiveJournal : Identity
LiveJournal : Account Types
