The blog "Om Malik on Broadband" has a entry that says Six Apart, the company formed around the blog engine Movable Type, has plans to buy Live Journal which hosts a community with blog-like user pages. I can certainly understand why Live Journal would want to sell out - it began as a hobby, quickly exploded, and has often suffered scalability issues - but I'm not sure what Six Apart would get out of a merger, apart from LJ's vast user base, which it could bring over to its hosted TypePad service, particularly when you consider that the Live Journal backend is open source.
I'd long been dismissive of Live Journal as a source of content. Perhaps I was turned off by the ugly design of the sites or the fact that it attracts a non-technical audience. But, in recent months, I get it. Live Journal is a community of users sharing their experiences in journals, rather than media projects made by individuals. This is a crass generalization, but blogs seem to be more aspirational than Live Journals. Blogs are a tool for authors to share viewpoints and links, while Live Journal is an environment for interacting online. I've become something of a fan of the site for the supportive networks of users it has fostered and the culture of experimentation. Live Journals often look ugly, but there also seems to be less pressure to seem polished or authoritative compared to even Blogger-based blogs.
If Six Apart's aim in acquiring Live Journal is to grab its user base, I doubt it will be able to convert many users into paid TypePad subscribers. Even current paid Live Journal users would miss the non-paying members in their networks, and probably opt out of subscribing, since the primary attractor would be gone. Moreover, an effort to force Live Journal users into TypePad accounts would be a PR blunder on the magnitude of Six Apart's decision to begin charging users of Movable Type, which greatly diminished Six Apart's goodwill in the blog community and led to a mass migration to the WordPress platform.
I've got a LiveJournal that I use for my personal log. I wouldn't consider LJ a platform for my professional work, but for interacting with friends, it works well, and like EBay before it, there's a great network effect at play.
On the comment about the ugliness of LJ journals, I agree that many don't look good. However, a lot of LJ interaction is through friends lists; they are meta-blogs that aggregate recent posts using your own style. Another source of interaction is through clients that let you work on your own posts or posts to communities to which you are a member through a desktop application interface. This all tends to allow a lot of customization of how you read the material from the service, and lets you bypass the style choices others make that you disagree with.
It's even possible to apply other styles to reading other people's journals directly through clever URL construction :)
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