☆❀☆

So, I came across this via network -

Social Media, 20 Years Ago

- It's an interview with people who were involved in the first personal journal sites at the earliest points: OpenDiary, Diaryland, and Livejournal. I found it pretty neat.

It's a podcast, I think, but transcript is provided. Anyway, it brought back a whole rush of memories of my first experiences with online diaries/journals, of course! I started my Livejournal in 2002, but I had a OpenDiary quite a while before that. I think my early experiences with these sites affected the way that I use and approach the idea of online journals, even now.

OpenDiary was very... this came first, and felt like a very personal space. It was somewhere to write about your day, not somewhere for fandom or for Essays and Articles of the type a lot of people think of when they think about modern-day blogging. You could add friends on there, but from what I remember, there wasn't a "friends page" like LJ had, where all of the recently-posted entries from people you'd added displayed; instead there was a page where the people you'd added would be marked in bold, but you still had to click through manually to see the entries. And from what I recall there wasn't much of a search - you could search users, but I don't recall any kind of interest search or entry search. And there weren't communities, either.

It sounds kind of lonely when I put it that way. But I still feel kind of nostalgic for the format, even if I probably wouldn't start an OD now. (Yes, it still exists!)

Here's something that jumped out at me. First, a comment from Lisa Phillips, who was a sysadmin for Livejournal:

...people who are not on LiveJournal would ask me kind of like, "How do you know what's going on; how do you know the gossip?" "Oh, you gotta read LiveJournal; everybody's on there."

And then continuing from there, commentary from Bruce Ableson, founder of OpenDiary:

One of the key differences we saw between LiveJournal and Open Diary was what Lisa described with LiveJournal where groups of people who knew each other would use it. Sort of like how Facebook is now was much more prevalent on air than Open Diary. Open Diary tended to be more people who are posting their personal things that they didn't wanna put somewhere else. And didn't necessarily invite their friends and family to come in

These illustrate the differences in the way I used OpenDiary and Livejournal pretty well, I think. OpenDiary was always just that - a diary, a very personal online space. But when I first started using Livejournal, it was a real-life space! Almost all of the people I had added on there were people I knew from school. That's how I managed to get one in the first place; somebody from school gave me an invite code. This was before anyone that I knew had Facebook; we used LJ to keep up with each other instead.

I usually don't see people mention OpenDiary when they talk about early blogging sites. But I think it might be because I usually see these conversations in the context of fandom use, and as far as I know there wasn't really a big "fandom presence" on OD. There were people who were fans of things, sure, but I don't know of anybody who was using the site as a fandom hub in the same way that people were doing fandom on LJ. This might be partly due to the limited search and lack of communities on OD, but I really don't know. If anybody does know something about this, I would be really interested in hearing about it.

Because I was so used to thinking of Livejournal as an RL-centric space, it took me a very long time to start using it for fandom in any real capacity, even though lots of people were using it for that. Not until 2009 or so! It still seems very new-to-me to use it that way, even if lots of people were using it that way before that. And I think the "personal journal, RL-centric" thing might partly contribute to the fact that I never really warmed up to using communities, though I can't really say for sure.

ANYWAY... The above stuff - the use of a journal as an actual journal - is why so many of my entries are about trivial real-life things. ;)

And before I wrap this up, I'll just say that I found this comment from Ableson to be rather hilarious:

So the second night the site was live, I wrote the code for what we call "notes," that in which were comments, and it was the first time comments had been put at the bottom of a page of content.

And I'm sorry about that.

GEEZE, DUDE. Look at the mess you unleashed on the world. xD

Switching journal sites is like moving into a new apartment. Everything's a mess and it's kind of disorienting for a while. In this particular case, it's even more jarring than the last time - last time, when I switched from a different diary site to LJ, I'd been using LJ for a little while before finally changing so it was more gradual. This is... interesting.

Since the APH anon meme moved to DW tonight, I'm moving too. New entries will be posted at DW. I'll be crossposting everything, and still checking my LJ friends list, but yeah. Mostly, I'll be over here.

Anyway. I do have a few things to write about, but that'll have to wait - this entry is mainly to check if crossposting works. (I hope so. Don't feel like fiddling with things tonight.)

Well, Eurovision was fun. Congratulations to Denmark. Wasn't my favourite song, but I thought it was all right.

(Top three for me were Romania, Greece, and Malta. Romania was just --- fffff. So Eurovision. And super-crazy singing. Lots of cracked-out skill there. I approve.)

Things have been a little bit frustrating lately; it seems impossible for me to get any time to myself whatsoever. There's always somebody breathing down my neck and demanding that I do things for them, and I hate it. Fortunately, my parents are going to Edmonton on Monday for an appointment, so I am going to have the Monday of the long weekend all to myself. Hell yes! My plans involve having French toast for breakfast, writing fic all day, and going out for a walk just because I feel like it and not having to explain my decision to anyone. Sounds like a blast. And hopefully I'll be able to sneak in some time for Holiday Star, too.

Finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude the other day. Awesome novel, would read it again. Normally it's kind of iffy whether or not I'll re-read a novel or not, but with that one, I can definitely see myself doing so eventually. It's just so damn good. I think the re-read value comes from the fact that it has so much stuff in it, though. So many things happen in it and it spans such a wide amount of time and there are so many relationship threads in it, wow. Yeah, definitely good stuff. Maybe I'll look up that guy's other books once I cut down on my to-read list a little bit more.

Right now I'm reading Oliver Twist... well okay, I've been reading it on and off for weeks. It's such a slog. I thought I'd like it, but, nope. But I don't dislike it enough to not finish it. When I was a kid, there was a cartoon version of it that would play on Saturday mornings, and I absolutely loved it, which is why I had hoped I'd like the novel. But... well, I guess not. They probably took some liberties with the story in the cartoon version. And I think, in general, this novel might be one that's better on film anyway; a large part of what I dislike about it is the narration, which would be absent in film. So I might look up a film version of it later, just to see what that's like.

My writing for the Nor/Ice fest is... uh... kind of stalled right now, though hopefully I can take care of that on Monday. I just plain haven't had time. And whenever I do get half an hour where I have nothing planned and I can do something, all I want to do is nap, which probably means that I'm stressed out (again) and need some rest (again). But I do have this fic about halfway done, and I know where I want to take it, so at the very least I think I'll be able to finish one fic for the fest, hopefully.

Livejournal's issues as of late have left me feeling less than optimistic about the future of the site. I'm not quite prepared to stop using it yet, but I'm going to be importing this journal to Dreamwidth more frequently than I usually do, and commenting on my flist over there more. If there's anyone here who has a journal over there and hasn't added me yet, feel free to do so, I won't mind one bit. And if you have any comm recommendations, throw them my way. I'm not as interested in fandom-related things these days, since Hetalia is still my main fandom, so anything that's more general (stuff related to writing, or books, or general wank, or anything) would be good.

( Boring real life stuff )

With the way LJ has been going up and down and up and down lately, people are scrambling to back things up. I'm no different. I've been going through Delicious and saving copies of all the stuff I have bookmarked. It's a pain in the ass, but what can ya' do, really.

I'm trying not to think too much about "What if" scenarios. That's just bothersome. But it doesn't hurt to be cautious, either.

People at the APH Anon Meme have been kind of flailing around because of all the outages. I'm not sure what we're going to do if LJ implodes completely. Some of them will move to the DW backup, I guess, but others - who knows?

The things I'm hearing about revised Delicious are not good, either. I'm going to have to be extra-vigilant about backing up indexes on there. I don't want to have to move everything to Pinboard permanently, but I need to be prepared to do that if it is necessary.

On the writing front, things are... uh. Going, I guess. Hard to find time for it, but I keep trying. I've been feeling a little bit frustrated with it lately; nothing seems to be turning out the way that I want it to. I have a new thing that I started recently, a kind of "fluff with plot" thing, and while it should be relatively straightforward, it isn't. I keep getting hung up on trying to decide what would be the right way for the characters to act toward one another, the right things that they need to say in order for the story to advance, and I just - I don't know, I'm having a ton of trouble with it. I guess if it doesn't turn out right when I scribble it down, I can fix it in the revising, but I'd rather do it properly the first time.