LJ v. blogging

[hermionesviolin]

My dad e-mailed me tonight:

Subject: As you have no doubt guessed,

I still don't have a livejournal.

I was thinking about it today as I was biking (NHS graduation tomorrow) and I realized that for some reason I am bothered by the following fact:  I do a lot of web reading.  I am pretty certain that I have been to at least a thousand different blogs.  But aside from places I've gone from your livejournal, I think I've only been to one lj.  That's like flipping a coin a thousand times and getting only one head.  Well, okay not really but you get the idea.  Why do I never see ljs?  Is it because I see mostly "idea" blogs and ljs are "what I did today" blogs?  Are lj idea blogs "Bush lied, people died" while I'm "Bush lied, and so do Obama, and Clinton, and ..."?  Does the lj community somehow seal itself off from the part of the web I read?  Is it hard to link to ljs so people I read don't?  Just what is the reason?  Any ideas?

I replied off-the-cuff:

I think while LJers often read blogs, bloggers are less likely to read LJs.  I feel like there's a clearer network of blogs (lots of blogs have blogrolls on the side, and if you read a blog regularly you get a feel for the people they link to/cite a lot), plus even LJers who do a lot of "idea blogging" ALSO do a lot of "what I did today" blogging, so the content-to-noise ratio may make more idea-heavy bloggers feel like it's not worth tracking those LJs.  It's an interesting question, though.  Some LJs don't allow anonymous commenting (i.e., commenting by people not logged in to an LJ account), but LJ now does support OpenID (http://www.livejournal.com/openid/) so that should lessen that problem.

I'm now really interested in this question.  Anyone have any thoughts?

Comments

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I also think that google doesn't list ljs in the same way it might other sites so that if you just type in a topic to find something to read, you're not going to get directed to an lj.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

That seems to be less true than it was even a year ago, though.

[dawllyllama.livejournal.com]

For me my LJ is just that... a journal. It's also my way of keeping up with my friends' day-to-day. Though I do try to share "check-out-this-cool-thing" blurbs every now and then, it is mostly just my "this-is-what-i-did-today" blog. I keep up with a lot of other subject specific blogs, but this is more my personal blog.