What Is This Ninth Month Doing Here

2010-09-02T04:42:24Z

September, I am not ready for you.

As you know, Bob, every time news posts, there is a race to be the first to find an offensive item in the LJ news post. Sometimes I roll my eyes and wonder why the noise and fireworks. This time, reliable sources are raising concerns about a security hole. LJ has introduced blogger-like "pingbacks" showing who links to a post, which may show locked content to people who weren't granted access. (See rivkat's post, by way of friends-of surfing through cofax7's journal).

When it comes to LJ/blogging, my rule of thumb is "text will get out", so even in locked posts, I try to write posts that will be embarrassing but not a safety or security hazard if they get loose in the world. With that said, I use LJ/DW as my after-hours hangout; Facebook is my pipeline to college friends, coworkers (past and present), and family; linkedin is strictly business. These groups need different information, so I dislike the thought of cross-posting. A screed about, say, feminism and Star Trek movies is not going to fly in Facebook's least common denominator environment. And the LJ/DW crowd doesn't need monthly "still in SF, still awesome" updates. The take-home message: I can't stop you from cross-posting anything I say on LJ/DW to FB or any other platform, but I will totally judge if you do. This is the only warning I will post.

(I'm not on Twitter. It doesn't embrace my multi-paragraph style to my satisfaction: when I decided I'd use it to post song lyrics chosen to illustrate my mood, as a self-parodying Web 2.0 performance piece, Twitter choked on the very first 170-character Neil Finn lyric fragment I tried to post. Compression by disemvowelment, I decided, would take self-parodying emo one step too far.)

If people are looking for DW invite codes, I have a bunch. Comment or PM and I will deliver.

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Toward Some Sort of DW Posting & Circle Policy

2009-04-30T03:58:33Z

My subscription policy can be lifted from LJ:
1.) Do you write interesting or amusing posts?

2.) Is your journal a low drama zone?

3.) Do I know you in real life?

4.) Do I have time to extend my reading list?

If the answers to all four questions are "yes", I'll probably subscribe. My access policy will be seat-of-the-pants, but at the moment is likely to be based on two more questions:

1.) If you showed up at my door, would I be happy to see you?

2.) Do I feel the need to barrage you with the details of my life?

Affirmative answers mean I inflict access on you. Unless you ask me not to, which I would understand. The non-public (not open?) posts are pretty uninteresting to people not me.

Since crossposting could get old, I'm also evolving the possibility of splitting LJ/DW posts by topic. In other words, where do I post amateur photo hour, and where do I post the condensed version of media trope analysis? (And by "analysis", I mean conversations like, "what the heck? John is River. Rodney is never River." And if you understood that, I am so, so sorry.) How much overlap will I have on the two sites? It's the nature of the beast that my reading/commenting communities are going to diverge; should my posts reflect that? LJ-style infodumps don't seem like actual blogging to me, but now that I have two locations to post to, should I try to write something more serious than the narrative of My Day With Squishy Socks once in a while? Or at least longer than 10 sentences at at time.

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