The Null Device

Today, we increasingly live in a world of software-mediated social interaction, and at this moment, Facebook is one of the largest such systems. As more people join Facebook, and it becomes an increasingly indispensible utility for connecting people, and the range of people one is connected to becomes much broader. Whereas once one's Facebook friends tended to be college buddies and close friends, they now include coworkers, family members, old schoolmates, neighbours and others.

Facebook's privacy options, however, haven't kept up with this change. When you post to your Facebook profile, there is no way to make posts visible by only a subset of your Facebook friends. So you're faced with the choice of self-censoring your posts to a level suitable for all users. You might not want your parents or employers to see photos of you partying, or might not want to bore your non-technical friends with talk about specialised subjects a subset of your friends would be interested in. So the end result is that Facebook is reduced to the lowest common denominator of subjects suitable for all audiences; things that won't shock or bore anyone. This leaves no suitable space for a large set of discussions: in-jokes between closely-knit groups of friends; specialist banter about C++ or football or archaeology; or even personal discussions you wouldn't necessarily want to share with your coworkers or casual acquaintances.

There are better ways to do this. The photo sharing site Flickr allows users to tag certain friends as "Family" or "Friends", and make some photos only visible to those groups. The LiveJournal system goes further, allowing users to define arbitrary numbers of friend groups and control who can see each post individually.

Facebook needs something like this if it's going to scale. It need not be an intrusive feature; a checkbox to the right of the "What's on your mind?" box, opening a "Show this post to: Everyone / All my friends / (groups)" drop-down, would suffice quite elegantly. (Something similar, of course, should be added for photos, notes and such, and made available to application developers.) This would make Facebook much more broadly useful as a tool for connecting people across the wide spectrum of social relationships they have in their lives.

Anyway, to wit, I have done the obvious thing about this deficiency and created a Facebook group about it. Perhaps if enough people join, the Facebook developers will listen.

¶ facebook flickr livejournal privacy social software 0

LiveJournal sacks almost its entire US workforce, including all US-based engineers, leaving only a few financial and support staff. Panic ensues, with perverts worldwide stocking up on emergency supplies of Harry Potter slash fiction in case it disappears.

Chances are, the obligatory jokes about disturbing online subcultures aside, LiveJournal won't disappear overnight. For one, the cuts are in the US office, and LiveJournal is now Russian-owned, and is much bigger in Russia (in America, the typical LiveJournal user is a thirtysomething goth-scene veteran with an IT job, whereas in Russia, it's a mainstream media site). Given that most of the money and ad revenue come from the Russian operation, it presumably won't cost them much to keep running an English-localised rump site on the same servers.

In any case, I hope LiveJournal survives, because it has one thing none of the other sites have: no, not Harry Potter slash fiction; fine-grained social-network-based access control, i.e., the means to specify that posts are not just friends-only but only accessible to a subset of friends. Which might sound like a symptom of some kind of geek social neurosis, but is actually useful. (Consider, for example, a Facebook friends list, containing everyone from coworkers to family members to people you met at a party or festival; as on Facebook, you can't control who can read a posted item (it's all your friends or no-one), there are a lot of things you cannot or should not post; from boasting about faking illness to planning surprise parties for contacts, to discussing personal situations, so your Facebook stream becomes a stream of lowest-common-denominator banalities.) Something with Facebook-level usability and LiveJournal-level access control would actually be useful; maybe once the world emerges from the New Depression, someone will write something like that?

(via everyone, it seems) ¶ business livejournal social software wd2 web 0

Vladimir Putin's United Russia party wins 64% of votes in Russian election. The big surprise is that, with all the stops they allegedly pulled out (putting pressure on state employees and students to vote for them, offering prizes for voting, and so on), they only managed 64% of the vote. Not that they'll be too disappointed; the two runners-up are the Communist Party and the absurdly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party (i.e., the party of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky), which ran the alleged London plutonium assassin as one of its candidates. Under new electoral rules, these are the only parties who will get into the parliament; pro-Western and pro-democracy parties will be conspicuous by their absence.

Meanwhile, blogging/journal/social-network service LiveJournal (which the older readers may remember as the stereotypical bastion of melodramatic, self-obsessed emo kids who wrote bad poetry before MySpace came along) has been sold to Russian internet company SUP, which is owned by a Putin loyalist. The official LiveJournal announcement is vague about future plans, but SUP has, ominously, already announced the creation of a Russian-based "abuse team". (It is not clear whether they will handle English-language posts.)

¶ livejournal managed democracy politics russia 0

Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal and architect of OpenID, has put forward his thoughts on the social graph problem — which is to say, the present state of affairs in which each social software application has its own social graph (of which user is connected to whom) which its users have to independently maintain — and how to go about aggregating these graphs into something less unwieldy:

Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.

Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there's a lot of hesitation in the developer / "Web 2.0" community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet.

From the user's point of view, this will allow some fairly nifty magic to happen, saving users the hassle of registering on yet another social network site and rounding up their friends:

A user should then be able to log into a social application (e.g. dopplr.com) for the first time, ideally but not necessarily with OpenID, and be presented with a dialog like: "Hey, we see from public information elsewhere that you already have 28 friends already using dopplr, shown below with rationale about why we're recommending them (what usernames they are on other sites). Which do you want to be friends with here? Or click 'select-all'."

What's happening with this proposal? so far, they have prototypes of the APIs, working on the data for 5 sites (LiveJournal and Vox are, not surprisingly, two of them), the start of a Firefox plug-in to drag MySpace, kicking and screaming, to the party, and the start of a website allowing users to register their points of presence in social networks; a limited beta is expected at some time in the future. There are apparently a lot of people from different organisations working on this, much as there were on the OpenID project, and a Google group has been set up for discussion of the details.

Note that this only covers social network (i.e., "x is a friend of y") data, and not the actual content (birthdays, photos, favourite movies/bands). There is another project named Move My Data, which aims to make the actual user data portable between accounts, though so far it seems to consist of a vague proposal.

(via /.) ¶ facebook firefox identity livejournal myspace openid semantic web social graph problem social networking social software tech web 0

Attention LiveJournal/MySpace kids: not getting enough attention? You can always try faking your death online, and watching the gushing tributes flow in:

(via hazyjayne) ¶ amusing culture emo livejournal online 0

LiveJournal (which was something like the MySpace of the 1990s, only not owned by the forces of evil and not spammy with ads) is testing its own instant messaging service. The service is technically a Jabber/XMPP server connected to LiveJournal, and using authentication and social-network data from LiveJournal's database. And, being XMPP, it can communicate with other open XMPP networks, such as Google Talk.

-- your Jabber Roster ("buddy list") is integrated with your LJ friends list. If you friend bob and bob friends you, both of you can see each other online. It has to be mutual. Friends that haven't friended you back show up as "pending subscription" in your jabber client, kinda grayed out, depending on the client.
-- if you add a LJ person in Jabber, it won't automatically friend them on the site, but next time you use the site, it'll prompt if you want to. It's imaginable there's people you want to chat with, but not befriend. Our strategy is "least surprises".

¶ im instant messaging livejournal social networking social software 0

A recent paper, A Corpus-based Approach to Finding Happiness (PDF) attempts to find a recipe for happiness, through the analysis of words in mood-tagged LiveJournal posts:

Our study is based on a collection of blogposts from LiveJournal.com, annotated with happy and sad moods. Every blog community practices a different genre of writingâ from our experience, LiveJournal.com blogs more closely recount the goings-on and happenstance of everyday life than any other blog community

For instance, a topic that is often talked about in relation to happiness is love. In fact, looking up the ANEW list of words, love ranks the third out of 1034 words, with a high 87.2 pleasure factor. Instead, the word love in our list is neutral, with a happiness factor of only 48.7. Moreover, a morphological variation of the same word, loved, is ranked similarly high in the ANEW list (86.4), but it is marked as a sad word in our list (28.1). The only happy variation of this word is lovely, which has a happiness factor of 77.3 (this word does not appear in the ANEW list). What these rankings suggest is that the stereotypical view of love (the public view) is that of a happy word (the ANEW ranking), but the more private view of this word is neutral, due to a balanced distribution of this concept in both happy and sad moments.

There are also several examples of words in our list that have a high happiness factor, and yet they are not even listed in the ANEW list of words. For instance, shopping (79.5) and bought (69.9), are two of the highly ranked words in our list. Similarly, food related events (lunch (73.1), dinner (72.1) food (65.0), drink (64.4), etc.) have a high happiness factor, with only two of these concepts (dinner and food) being mentioned in the ANEW list. Another interesting example that has a positive happiness load in our list is drunk (59.1), which is most likely not one of the most widely publicly admitted states of happiness.

Other observations in the paper: sad posts include more actions (presumably because of a tendency to write about bad things that happened) and "human-centred" words (the latter presumably because depression involves thinking about one's woeful lot in life, whereas happiness doesn't), whereas happy posts include more descriptions of things and "social" words. Also, the study answers Jens Lekman's question about birthdays in the affirmative, with the word "birthday" having a high happiness score. And whilst loving a person is likely to make one sad, loving a thing makes one happy, because we've all got a little bit of Gollum inside:

A large fraction of the bigrams with low happiness factor are centered around humans, i.e. miss you, I hate, I wish, for him, you were, etc. An observation in the same vein can be drawn from the ranking of three-grams, where facts revolving around love are related to humans in the top sad three-grams, I love him (37.33), I love you (37.09), but refer to objects in the three-grams with high happiness factor: I love it (85.00), I love the (82.85), I love that (68.62). This reinforces the findings from the previous section, which showed that expressions of sad feelings are more often human-centered than the happy feelings.

Go shop for something new — something cool, make sure that you love it. Then have lots of food, for dinner preferably, as the times of breakfast and lunch are to be avoided. Consider also including a new, hot taste, and one of your favorite drinks. Then go to an interesting place, it could be a movie, a concert, a party, or any other social place. Having fun, and optionally getting drunk, is also part of the recipe. Note that you should avoid any unnecessary actions, as they can occasionally trigger feelings of unhappiness. Ideally the recipe should be served on a Saturday, for maximum happiness effect. If all this happens on your birthday, even better.

(via evan) ¶ consumerism happiness livejournal statistics 2

Some website runs a poll to find "the sexiest man in tech" (presumably meaning "the sexiest CEO or venture capitalist in tech"; the actual backroom geeks are not considered sexy). A staff member from SixApart subsidiary LiveJournal posts to a user-feedback forum, urging LiveJournal users to vote for SixApart CEO Ben Trott. Which makes me wonder whether, somewhere on MySpace, there is a similar post urging users to vote for James Murdoch.

¶ ben trott livejournal myspace polls sexy sixapart 0

Inappropriate LiveJournal user icon of the day. You can count on the furries taking two segments of a Disney animation, juxtaposing them and making something that's just wrong.

(via b0rken) ¶ disney furries livejournal perverts wrong 0

The LiveJournal people have unveiled their distributed identity system. Temporarily dubbed "yadis", it's based on FOAF and an AJAX-esque backchannel (though does not need to use AJAX technologies, or even JavaScript), and will ultimately allow sites to accept users authenticated on other sites; it also stands a good chance of somehow finding its way into the next version of SixApart's TypeKey. Update: It has now been renamed "OpenID", and also has a nifty, and somewhat Apple-esque, grey-and-orange icon.

¶ identity livejournal openid tech web 1

Orkut-style brownie points for LiveJournal; i.e., a page which lets you say how cool/hot/trustworthy the people on your friends list are, and whom you're a fan of. Not without its share of problems; anyone can impersonate anyone else, and (perhaps for this reason), there's no way of seeing how many brownie points you gave people before. Also, annoyingly enough, it makes no distinction between people in your friends list and people who have friended you; coupled with its lack of memory, this means that every time you run it, you have to pick the serial adders, trolls and prehensile idiots off, and then reassign points to all the people you've selected.

¶ livejournal orkut social software whuffie 0

LiveJournal Drama Generator; for those who don't have enough drama in their online lives:

Oh yeah. it's so not fair that I have this morning off but nobody wants to do anything :-(. I'll just sit home alone and write poems about death.

that jerk jwz gone and said that I got caught backstabbing pfarley. And yeah. You might guess I don't give a flying f*** what they think anymore. I'm over that.

Oh and Why does imomus keep posting images in their journal?! I keep telling them I'm on a modem! I'm going to unfriend them to teach them a lesson!!!!!!!!!!

And also everybody has asked why I'm leaving the furry fandom but the answer is simple: Some of you know who you are and why I'm leaving FOREVAR.

¶ drama emo humour livejournal random text 0

A compelling argument claiming that Yahoo! will buy SixApart within six months. Which, given Yahoo!'s tradition of clueless heavy-handedness, means that TypePad and LiveJournal will be steamrolled into an all-new, cut-down and obnoxiously ad-saturated Yahoo! personal publishing solution for those who don't know any better. (See also: eGroups)

Link via David Gerard, who speculates that the smarter rats aboard the LiveJournal ship will already have sensed what's in the offing and made developing a method of cryptographic cross-site authentication their priority; this makes sense, as it will allow people to jump ship to their own LJ-based servers and keep the social-network functionality that made LJ useful, without having to get all their friends to agree which server to be on.

¶ livejournal rumours sixapart yahoo 0

It's confirmed: SixApart (the company set up by Bay Area A-list blogerati who brought you Movable Type and TypePad) have bought LiveJournal (an Oregon-based social-network/journal system most commonly associated with goths and 12-year-old girls). SixApart's FAQ is here, LiveJournal's announcement is here. It appears to be a friendly deal, and SixApart indicated that they will run the services separately, rather than, say, rolling one into the other and using the remaining brand-name for niche marketing or something, and also said that they won't plaster LJ with ads or anything.

Meanwhile, SixApart president (and former black-clad teenager) Mena Trott has more to say here:

I believe that LiveJournal has, unfortunately, received a bum rap because many have considered the postings on LiveJournal to be trivial. It's sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say (and I'm generalizing). The fact is, webloggers and LiveJournalers are in essence doing the same thing: they are posting their thoughts to people who are important to them. For some webloggers, it's 100,000 people, for others it is 10. For LiveJournalers, it may be 30 people, it may be 3 (or a combination of some number).

The funny thing is, you can have a weblog and a LiveJournal. The fact that some of the funniest and smartest people I know have both only reaffirms that we shouldn't limit ourselves to one sort of publishing/communication mode.

(She hits the nail on the head there. I, for one, have had both for a bit over a year. The way I divide them is that this blog is for communicating with anybody who shares the things I'm interested in and post about, whereas my LiveJournal is for communicating with friends/people I know personally. Consequently, my LiveJournal posts tend to be less interesting (at least to people who don't know me personally), and many of them are friends-only (the use of the social-network data on LiveJournal for authentication goes some way towards restoring the private register, which is otherwise hard to do online conveniently). I generally friend people I know online or in real life, though I still think that LiveJournal should split the "friend" relation into two independent "journals I read" and "people I trust" relations.)

¶ business livejournal sixapart web 1

Rumour has it that Six Apart, creators of Movable Type and TypePad, are about to acquire LiveJournal, for an undisclosed sum. I wonder whether this will mean them folding the two services together completely, merging the codebases whilst keeping LiveJournal as a "TypePad for teens" brand, keeping them entirely separate as now, or integrating LiveJournal's social networks with TypeKey. And whether this will put a halt on LJ's existing development plans, such as splitting the "friend of" relation into separate reading and trust relations.

¶ business livejournal sixapart web 0

Teenaged girl has her mother murdered, posts about it to her LiveJournal (which is titled "My Crappy Life").

Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered

I wont have computer acess (sic) until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.

Apparently the issue that touched off this unusually fatal bout of teen-angst had to do with Mom keeping food away from her and threatening to send her to fat camp; so she got two of her ex-boyfriends (both 24 years old) to help her out. Not surprisingly, the entry has attracted over 2,000 comments, alternating between variants of "hope you rot in hell" and "nice to see everyone here is so quick to judge", and then degenerating into goatse and such.

¶ crime emo livejournal murder 1

The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh: or the Cthulhu Mythos meets online journals, with the obligatory rap-metal band references and dumb online surveys:

We walked around and looked at all the rundown houses until even Chris admitted there wasn't anything to see. Finally we just went to the bar and hung out there for a while (they don't check ID which is cool). There were actually some guys our age and in thier 20s -- the oldest people I've ever seen here. Right away Chris started acting like a dick again, saying I could probably score with the girls there since most of them had my bulging eyes / narrow face problem.

¶ cthulhu livejournal lovecraft 0

As a social networking system, LiveJournal is rather doovy; it's got more of a point to it than Friendster and such, and goes some way towards restoring some approximation of the private register. However, as a source of psychoceramic material, it is somewhat lacking, lagging well behind systems such as USENET and the odd self-contained website.

I took a look at LJDrama, an anonymous blog collecting incidents of "drama" from LJ and similar sites. Basically, if someone blows their stack and goes off the deep end, their antics may well end up there. The thing is, most of this is teenagers with brightly-dyed hair and low self-esteem throwing hissy fits about who said what to whom and so on. The issues at hand all seem trivial and interchangeable; their exact details are seldom interesting or unique. To one brought up on a diet of kooks, crackpots and original thinkers, all this makes for rather bland fare. As far as genuine cranks go, LiveJournal has yet to produce an Archimedes Plutonium, an Alexander Abian, a Doctress Neutopia, or even a John "DrGodFuck" Grubor; the closest it gets to the lofty strata of psychoceramicity is a few kinky Furries and slash-fiction writers, and the odd joke community.

I wonder why this is so. Could it be that the social nature of LiveJournal selects against the original cranks and, instead, encourages crankdom to take annoying, lowest-common-denominator forms? Perhaps those who can be bothered setting up and maintaining a LiveJournal account are, by definition, too socially well adjusted to be truly eccentric or "out there" (and no, having lots of body piercings and being into kinky sex isn't "out there"). Perhaps true outsiderhood requires a degree of hermitlike isolation from others' opinions to truly allow one's mental reality to drift away from any sort of consensus.

¶ culture emo livejournal psychoceramics 5

LJDrama.org hax0red, by someone who left a message written in a mixture of h4x0r-d00d-l33t5p33k and hip-hop-thugese.

SHOUTOUTS: The #insub CReW, POUND EL, all my HOMIEZ in the CLINK, the SFIMC K1DZ, yourmom, ...

"all my HOMIEZ in the CLINK"? Word, you must be a bad-ass gangbanger, dog.

YOU HAVE B33N SK00L3D. THE INT0RW3B IS NOT UR PLAYGR0UND

Looks like ljdrama.org picked on the wrong angstpuppies for once or something.

¶ emo griefers livejournal ljdrama 6

The deleterius Memorable Posts list is a veritable trove of all that is inane, retarded and simply wrong in the world of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fan fiction; and is very entertaining to read, in much the way that the Darwin Awards are.

The various teen-angst subcultures are well-represented, with Tathiel the multiply-pierced Mordorian Elf/Vampyre, who seduces Elrond whilst having a fling with Grima Wormtongue (who, in this story, is terminally shy, sweetly awkward virgin, and really a nice guy deep down), Christa, the irritatingly bitchy teenage goth with bad attitude, whose Aura of Smooth prevents her from being decapitated by the Tolkien characters she abuses, Candie, the bad-ass Avril Lavigne-quoting skate-punk member of the fellowship, and this Harry Potter-universe ad for US mall-goth clothing chain Hot Topic:

In the begging of the summer she went to a muggle mall in London. While she was there she found a store called "Hot Topic". She went in and fell in love with the clothes. She had been what you would call a prep all her life but now she had found out what punk was.

(Hot Topic in London? And to think that had they done some research, they could have had her just go up Camden High Street. Oh, and replace "prep" with "townie" or something.)

Meanwhile, key characters from Middle Earth offer group hugs for alienated self-cutters; meanwhile, Bilbo is warped into contemporary America, only to be adopted by the teenaged Mary Sue, who calls him "Elijah"; and Melissa and Joy smash up Middle Earth - with a car. And then there's this all-powerful Mary Sue, who's loved by all sides, wiser than Gandalf, and gets to slap Galadriel around; oh, and she has a horse named Kyouryoku, who came from a village of "Ramen elves", I kid you not. Then there's this horribly convoluted Harry Potter/LOTR/Sandman crossover. And who could go past this piece of wish fulfillment by a 38-year-old "bardess", who has herself going to Middle Earth, charming everybody to her will and having hot sex with Haldir, with them becoming ancestors of Socrates, Confucius and Tolkien.

It's a sobering thought that, as you read this, in candle-lit suburban bedrooms all over North America, pizza-faced teenaged girls in size-XXL Hot Topic fishnet tops are pouring her fantasies about Legolas ("OMG he's so hott!!!1!") and angst about their lousy non-pony-buying parents into their PCs, thus endlessly replenishing this cornucopia of pure shite for future visitors.

I haven't had a chance to look through the Potter ones in great detail, except that there are a lot of über-k3wl American exchange students/teachers who introduce those stuffy Brits to things like punk and goth that they haven't heard of over there yet. For all I know, someone could have written a Harry Potter story in which all the characters are furries, like, Snape is a snow leopard or something.

¶ amusing fan fiction livejournal mary sue unintentionally hilarious 7

LiveJournal of the day: HP LaserJet model 1150:

I have decided to take some "Postscript as a second language" courses at the local community college.

I think my inability to speak anything but PCL is hindering my career.

¶ anthropomorphism geek humour livejournal 0

Ten things yet to happen on LiveJournal:

1. A new community is formed for gothic, anorexic self-harmers: bleeding_skeletons is an immediate success with angsty teenagers everywhere.

8. "The LiveJournal Movie" is released. Starring an aging Minnie Driver as an angsty goth teenager and a CGI reproduction of River Phoenix as Blog Boy it is an immediate box office flop. Industrial Light and Magic receive an Oscar for the graphics.

10. Video posting is implemented. BBC News soon after reports of a phenomenon it has dubbed "The Second Coming of Camgirls". Many teenage boys across the country experience a very personal second coming themselves. Google pulls out of LiveJournal. It is bought by Danni Ashe.

¶ anorexia camgirls emo goth humour livejournal self-harm 1

Could this be the apotheosis of LiveJournal drama? Seminal teen-angst vampire-novel author Poppy Z. Brite kicked out of LiveJournal group, presumably because the moderator wanted the honour of smacking her down. Champagne comedy, folks. (via bOING bOING)

(I didn't even know Poppy Z. Brite had a LiveJournal; though, in retrospect, it'd be more surprising if she didn't have one. Which makes me wonder: does Trent Reznor have one?)

¶ drama emo goth livejournal poppy z. brite 7

After looking around LiveJournal a bit, it occurred to me that someone could easily do a LiveJournal Bingo game.

Look at your "friends of friends" page and tick off any of the following you find there:

• South Park-style goth/raver/hipster user icon
• anime user icon
• Photographs of cats
• "Which ___ are you" test
• "personality" test whose outcome is based entirely on user's name
• 3 or more people doing the same bogus test
• Vampires
• Furries
• "Current music: Radiohead"
• Sexual compatibility test results
• Discussion of romantic situation involving 4 or more people
• IRC/MSN chat transcript that's two or more pages long

Have I missed anything?

¶ culture livejournal memes 1

The LJ Times, a generative art hack which populates a newspaper-style page with random LiveJournal entries and Associated Press photographs. Quite amusing.

(Hmmm... the LiveJournal XML feeds offer a veritable cornucopia, or perhaps an Augean stable, of postings, most of them all but meaningless to people who don't know the poster, and thus functionally indistinguishable from computer-generated text or cut-up art. (The blogosphere at large can be said to have similar properties, though not all of it is in one convenient location.) I'm surprised more artists haven't harnessed these founts of commentary to power generative-art installations.)

¶ automatism dadaism digital art found art livejournal xml 1

A few days ago, a LiveJournal creation code fell into my hands (ta, jwz!); consequently, I now have a LiveJournal. It's probably going to be a bit on the sparse side, as I have this blog for most of my writing, though I may find a use for it.

The most interesting thing about the LiveJournal system is the social-software side of it; the interests/friends thing. It's a pity that one cannot fully participate in that with an external blog. It'd be good if there was an option to make one's journal get its content from an external RSS feed, whilst retaining control over one's profile.

¶ livejournal social software 9