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Livejournals and Blogging, an observation
Jan. 4th, 2004 10:58 pmAt Satuday night dinner during the just-completed (but never-ending) NYRSF Work Weekend, we were discussing the differences between "blogging" and "Livejournaling".
For me, there really isn't one; I very much use LJ as a dirt-simple blogging software package. The only thing I can't do with LJ that I could do with Moveable Type, I said, is check my referrer logs. (There are other minor differences; I can't disemvowel other peoples' comments to my posts, but I mostly don't care.) LJ's community features are decent, but I don't make a lot of use of them beyond the Friends list, which is really just a form of LJ-specific blogroll. One of the other people at the dinner--the one who made the terrific beef stew over brown rice that we were greedily consuming--felt that there was a huge contextual difference between a blogroll and a page with "These People Are My Friends" written all over it, that a "Friends" page has an implict ownership that a blogroll doesn't. I disagree--one can't be held responsible for everything one's friends do--but even if I did, it would still seem like a minor difference to me.
Well, this morning I got a reminder of one other key difference: LJ doesn't host images. The images I put up for my LJ and for the LJs of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nellorat and supergee are all stored on my web space at Panix.com, my "home" ISP for my e-mail, Usenet, and Unix shell access. One thing of which I was vaguely aware but hadn't put a lot of attention into is the fact that I have a mere 250 MB of downloads for free from my Panix web server. As far as I know, this has never been an issue. Until this morning, when I got the bill for all of the people who downloaded nellorat's ratine Christmas story.
As nearly as I can tell--I don't keep detailed logs on Panix, either, though I think I could--somewhere between 800 and 1000 people downloaded that page in December. Yow. I hope it brought you much joy!
I've now set my server to limit my total web-based largess to $5 per month. This still lets me supply the world with 10 MB per day, so the first ten people per day who check out the rat story will be fine.
For me, there really isn't one; I very much use LJ as a dirt-simple blogging software package. The only thing I can't do with LJ that I could do with Moveable Type, I said, is check my referrer logs. (There are other minor differences; I can't disemvowel other peoples' comments to my posts, but I mostly don't care.) LJ's community features are decent, but I don't make a lot of use of them beyond the Friends list, which is really just a form of LJ-specific blogroll. One of the other people at the dinner--the one who made the terrific beef stew over brown rice that we were greedily consuming--felt that there was a huge contextual difference between a blogroll and a page with "These People Are My Friends" written all over it, that a "Friends" page has an implict ownership that a blogroll doesn't. I disagree--one can't be held responsible for everything one's friends do--but even if I did, it would still seem like a minor difference to me.
Well, this morning I got a reminder of one other key difference: LJ doesn't host images. The images I put up for my LJ and for the LJs of
nellorat and supergee are all stored on my web space at Panix.com, my "home" ISP for my e-mail, Usenet, and Unix shell access. One thing of which I was vaguely aware but hadn't put a lot of attention into is the fact that I have a mere 250 MB of downloads for free from my Panix web server. As far as I know, this has never been an issue. Until this morning, when I got the bill for all of the people who downloaded nellorat's ratine Christmas story. As nearly as I can tell--I don't keep detailed logs on Panix, either, though I think I could--somewhere between 800 and 1000 people downloaded that page in December. Yow. I hope it brought you much joy!
I've now set my server to limit my total web-based largess to $5 per month. This still lets me supply the world with 10 MB per day, so the first ten people per day who check out the rat story will be fine.
