Six Apart Buys Live Journal?

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type (the software that powers many blogs across the net) is buying journaling service Live Journal.

Personally, I don’t get it. LiveJournal is known mainly as a kind of blog ghetto, usually LiveJournals are angst-ridden teen diaries that are quickly abandoned after a few weeks. The LiveJournal technology is nowhere near as advanced as that in Movable Type. The LiveJournal team does have some interesting technology in regards to load balancing software and file systems, but most of that is open source and could be used without acquiring the whole company.

Granted, this acquisition would give 6A a huge marketshare, but with all the recent problems with Movable Type installations (which to their credit were fixed with the new release) and the whole licensing brouhaha of last year, I’m not sure that this gives them much advantage. Then again, if they can improve LiveJournal to make it a more credible competitor with Blogger good for them. It will be interesting to see what they plan on doing in the future.

Personally, I’m perfectly happy with WordPress, but anything that helps foster innovation in blogging is a good thing.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Slashdot is saying it’s not being sold… interesting…

UPDATE: This site has some interesting thoughts on the cultural differences between 6A and LiveJournal users.

3 thoughts on “Six Apart Buys Live Journal?

  1. Really? How odd. I’ve been active on LJ for 3 years, I’m 30 and not particularly angst ridden, and virtually everyone I know on LJ is too. I have yet to encounter these people we’re known for. But I’m sure they’re there. That’s the thing about the LJ interface; you find likeminded people and don’t have to see the rest. (Also I, like many LJers, block Google from spidering my journal, so it may be that in searchable results the others are disproportionately represented.)

    In my experience, journals tend to get far more comments than all but the most famous bloggers, and far more interactive discussions between readers, thanks to threaded commenting and optional email comment notification.

    Those, the aggregrated updates on a single page, and the ability to selectively filter who is trusted to read a given post, define livejournal’s social model as a bunch of interlocking communities. Lacking any of that functionality, I found Moveable Type much *less* advanced technologically. (As an end user. I know nothing about the underlying structure.) I suppose it’s all a question of what direction you’re trying to advance in.

    In my experience a journal is not a cut-rate blog, it’s its own thing, and I’m far more interested in the former than the latter. (No offense to bloggers intended. It’s the difference between dialogue and solioquy. Either can be well or poorly done, but the fact that a good dialogue would be a bad solioquy is beside the point.)

  2. I’m sure there are a number of LiveJournals, but the vast majority of them tend to be of the whiny teen variety. Of course, the same could be said of blogs as well…

  3. It’s not too hard to find whiny or lame journalers or bloggers, it’s just that LJ gathers them all in one place and makes them easy to search for, whilst everyone else is attempting to scrub blogs off of the bigger search engines. At least, that’s the take I have – taking an interest in this issue is likely the closest I’ve ever been to doing “blogging”. I’m not quite certain how combining LJ with a blogging company will work.

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