Random raves

Here's a dinky tool you can use to track down people you know on LJ and on DW - it's simply matching handles, so it won't find those who have made a change, but it's a start. http://lj-friends-on-dw.filmgold.com/

Very shortly, I'm going to turn off comments on my LJ posts. I would prefer to read comments on my posts in one place, and most people on my FL who regularly comment on my journal already have DW journals. If you'd rather I didn't turn of LJ comments for a while yet, please let me know.

However, even if I get a whole bunch of people asking me not to turn off LJ comments for a while, that's only delaying the inevitable, as far as I'm concerned. Long-term, I pretty much am only intending to follow LJ journals of people who haven't got DW journals, and to participate in some comms.

If you would like to comment over on my DW posts, there are two ways:-

1. Get a DW journal yourself - I even still have an invite available, so comment here (comments locked) with your email if you want one.
2. Sign up with your OpenID (every LJ user has one, but other sites provide them as well) on DW, and it gives you the ability to follow friends over here, and allows us to add your LJ id to our "Circles" (so you can get to see locked posts and comment). All you need to do is provide your email address, associate it with your OpenID, and you're done. Even if you don't want to get a journal over here, it'd be nice to see you having a chat.

Just as a question, how many of you are planning to get DW journals?

I've decided that on DW, I won't be subscribing to people's journals that consist mainly or entirely of LoudTwitter posts. One of the things I like about these journalling sites is that they encourage us to write prose. Sure, sometimes all you want to say can be expressed in a line or two, but those lines are usually contiguous and meaningful.

With Twitter, tweets seem much more gnomic (unless you're aware of the context) and are often time-sensitive and contingent. The latter is fine, but duplicating them on a journalling site that can act as an archive and which is designed to encourage discussion seems somehow unnecessary. Twitter is a one-to-many communication; while a journal can be like that, it's also about many-to-many communication, and that's its strength. Regarding my first objection, the meaninglessness of many tweets without context, it's exacerbated - for me - by the fact that LoudTwitter aggregates them once a day, so you can have several lines of unrelated thoughts in a post that I want to read as connected. It makes my brain ache. I also prefer to be able to instantly see where a link is taking me, and naturally TinyURL and the like are not conducive to that.

I think the most important thing I want to say about not receiving tweets via LJ or DW is that there is already more than one way I can follow people anyway. Firstly, I have a Twitter account myself, also as "trixtah", which was predominantly made for the purpose of subscribing to other people's tweets (who knows, maybe I'll get hooked myself). Secondly, I, and anyone else, can subscribe to someone's Twitter page via RSS. We can even get an RSS feed in our journals' subscription pages, if we want to. In fact, Twitter is really just like a portable RSS feed. It seems that posting them as journal posts is completely redundant.

On LJ, I won't be defriending anyone who has moved to an entirely Twitter-based posting practice, but I will be removing them from my default filter. If you want to make a connection on Twitter, great (and I've already hooked up with a bunch of people). But that's the only way I'll be following Twitter-based communications from now.