LiveJournal

From ArticleWorld

LiveJournal is an online virtual community where users can publish and maintain a blog. LiveJournal is also the name of the server software which supports it. It was started by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, and purchased by Six Apart in 2005.

The main feature of LiveJournal is its friend list, which makes it more socially-aimed than other blog websites. The blogs are customized using a simple programming language called S2.

Privacy

LiveJournal offers a number of important privacy options. Users can choose not to have their weblogs indexed by search engines, and they can also restrict the blog to be viewed only by people on their friend lists, or post content only they can read. This makes LiveJournal a fairly complex social network when compared to other similar blogging communities.

Controversy

LiveJournal was invitation-based for some time, as the number of users was growing too rapidly for the servers to support. The invitation system did allow for a closed community, adding a feel of elitism, but it was only temporary, and some users actually liked it so much they would have preferred it was permanent.

As the number of users increased, a special Abuse team was created to deal with cases of violations of the Terms of Service and copyright or other similar laws. However, its actions often fell under users' criticism for disregarding the Terms of Service, especially after a policy document used by the abuse team was leaked. Many users decided to abandon LiveJournal, leading public to the impression that LiveJournal is not a good place for web blogging and journalism. In fact, a cracking group known as Bantown conducted a number of malicious actions against LiveJournal in response the Abuse team's handling of events.

Some users also objected the selling of LiveJournal to Six Apart, as Six Apart was selling proprietary software and wanted to make changes to the guiding principles of Live Journal.