LiveJournal is an OnlineCommunity which offers people a place to set up an OnlineDiary and get responses from others, etc. The entire site is run from the OpenSource concept and paid accounts give users more features which helps pay for the servers:
- Adds the ability to look up other users based on locations and interests
- Shortens your address from http://www.livejournal.com/users/myname to http://myname.livejournal.com/
- Gives you more abilities to customize your journal (the way it looks basically)
- Allows you to embed polls in your journal (because VotingIsGood)
- Headline-style RichSiteSummary 0.91 (which some might say is the One True RSS), but one must use an RSS "style" (the paid-only customization feature) to get actual post content into an RSS aggregator (However, note that recent changes to the LiveJournal codebase have made RSS and Atom feeds available to all users, not only the paid ones, i.e. http://www.livejournal.com/users/myname/data/rss and /data/atom.)
Most people pay to support the project rather than for features.
The real crux of LiveJournal is the Friends page, a list of the most recent posts from people one has added to one's Friends list. This turns LiveJournal into a DiaryCollective of weblogs more writing-oriented than the common news weblog, and peer pressure within existing groups to join driven by MetcalfesLaw. [An explanation of LJ friendship and access policies can be found here.]
The community is probably the most successful OnlineDiary/WebLog service around, having over 900,000 active users of 1.8 million total accounts at the beginning of 2004.
There are several other sites running on the LiveJournal codebase. See also sister site DeadJournal at http://www.deadjournal.com
- Mega Tokyo [comic strip] about LiveJournal
- LjFind [search engine] of LiveJournal