I love blogs and blogging, and have been trying (not entirely unsuccessfully) to promote them at my college. I have a class of students set up in LJ - somewhat by default because it was the easiest platform to use and get them into quickly (you can see them by going to
debbie_g and checking out the friends page). I have a Vox account and a Blogger account, neither of which I use, and have been asking my college to install Moveable Type so that we can have a simple, clean interface for students to use. If that happens, I will move my
debbie_g account there.
Are there some unwritten criteria about why one is "cool" and one is not? All my DE (computer in education) cohorts use Moveable Type or Typepad, mostly because they have the luxury of installing something into their own server and maintaining it themselves, or know someone who can or will. I'm aware that they somewhat look down their noses at LJ - not quite sure why. Lots of teachers (k-12) and librarians use Blogger. There's a big children's lit cohort that I follow, all in Blogger. Why do they choose Blogger over LJ? Is LJ perceived as being too "young" or "out there" in some way? And yes, I am aware of MySpace - there seems to be a professional concensus _against_ that, and I forbid my students to have a course blog in MySpace. I tried Blogger and got instantly spammed, which has never happened in here (and I know there are ways around that). It seems that many writers are in LJ, especially women. Some authors, like Neil Gaiman and William Gibson, have minions to create a blog especially for them, but there are many authors in here. Some people maintain more than one blog on more than one platform, but I really don't have time to have more than... maybe two. Really what I'd like is just one that I could filter to that students didn't have access to really personal stuff. And I actually like the layout options in Blogger or TypePad, especially for sidebars, more than those in LJ, though I've never fully explored the LJ options or tried to create my own. I don't like the fact that you can't put script in LJ, so that I can't have a Flickr badge, for example.
So, a question for my flist: if you've managed to wade through all this somewhat incoherent musing, I'd be very interested to hear from some of you about why you chose LJ, and what prompted you, if you have more than one blog, to have another in a different platform.
And yes, I'm scared that if I were to go exclusively somewhere outside of LJ, I'd lose all my LJ friends...
(excuse typos - I'm writing this before having got fully "up" and am not wearing my best eyesight enhancers)
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Are there some unwritten criteria about why one is "cool" and one is not? All my DE (computer in education) cohorts use Moveable Type or Typepad, mostly because they have the luxury of installing something into their own server and maintaining it themselves, or know someone who can or will. I'm aware that they somewhat look down their noses at LJ - not quite sure why. Lots of teachers (k-12) and librarians use Blogger. There's a big children's lit cohort that I follow, all in Blogger. Why do they choose Blogger over LJ? Is LJ perceived as being too "young" or "out there" in some way? And yes, I am aware of MySpace - there seems to be a professional concensus _against_ that, and I forbid my students to have a course blog in MySpace. I tried Blogger and got instantly spammed, which has never happened in here (and I know there are ways around that). It seems that many writers are in LJ, especially women. Some authors, like Neil Gaiman and William Gibson, have minions to create a blog especially for them, but there are many authors in here. Some people maintain more than one blog on more than one platform, but I really don't have time to have more than... maybe two. Really what I'd like is just one that I could filter to that students didn't have access to really personal stuff. And I actually like the layout options in Blogger or TypePad, especially for sidebars, more than those in LJ, though I've never fully explored the LJ options or tried to create my own. I don't like the fact that you can't put script in LJ, so that I can't have a Flickr badge, for example.
So, a question for my flist: if you've managed to wade through all this somewhat incoherent musing, I'd be very interested to hear from some of you about why you chose LJ, and what prompted you, if you have more than one blog, to have another in a different platform.
And yes, I'm scared that if I were to go exclusively somewhere outside of LJ, I'd lose all my LJ friends...
(excuse typos - I'm writing this before having got fully "up" and am not wearing my best eyesight enhancers)
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