As someone who writes for a living too, there is a huge appeal. You get to write about the things that you don’t get to write about in your job. You get to rant 
I messed up my link before, it’s: istara’s LiveJournal.
I don’t have one of these journals, nor will I ever get one. It appears the only real use for them is sharing information about your life to other people. As a college student, most of the journals I have read seem to be the only outlet that person has to vent their feelings. A lot of them are all about how shitty the author’s life is and how depressed they are that no one cares enough to listen to their rants in person. One journal of another student in my department was simply an outlet for trying to get a girl back. He would pretend or write like he was telling his inner most feelings about this girl to his other buddies, knowing very well she reads it every night.
Bottom line…the old fashioned, private journals make a lot more sense.
I was linked to what appeared to be an SDMB live journal. I’m also totally unfamiliar with the medium of live journals.
Almost all of the posts I read were from members whose member name I recognized ( either past or current posters to SDMB ).
Almost all of the posts consisted of hacking away at Dopers, and so on.
-shrug- I don’t see the need to go there, since I haven’t entered The Pit in a few years now.
And, although Ginger and I haven’t spoken for a few years I have to say I agree with what she said. If you have something to say, say it directly.
I would add, say it publicly.
Cartooniverse
LJ doesn’t have to have anything to do with the SDMB. I personally use the LJ for Buffy/Angel fandom related activities. New fics, new vids, icons, fanarts, reviews, etc. Nearly everybody on my LJ is related to fandom somehow, except a handful of SDMB members.
You can use LJ as a place to post the mundane aspects of your life, but you know, there’s just some things you want to post about or that interest you that you can’t post on the SDMB. I’m sure everybody here doesn’t give a fuck if I’ve started a new fic or found a new picture of James Marsters to squee over.
OOh. I love that you have your Amazon Wish List on there! Good idea.
I just echo your post. There are some very bad, lame, boring, vitriolic journals and communites. There are some, ok few, gems. It is just fun to have an interactive blog. Don’t judge the whole system because of the bad communities.
Here is mine ;):http://saladbar.livejournal.com/
I discovered another good use for mine. I came up with an idea for a thread here, but I hesitated to post it. I decided instead to float the idea to anyone who would read my journal. You know, like a test audience.
Hey, if it’s a bad idea, I can learn that quickly through my journal; if I did it here and it was a bad idea, people’d jump me for it needlessly.
My LJ is my forum for stuff that is too mundane and pointless for MPSIMS.
Another aspect that I like about it is the writing. Unlike Eve, I will never be a professional writer. It also seems like very hard work, so I don’t have any real aspirations to be a professional writer. But I enjoy writing in a bush league sort of way, so LJ is nice, organized way to keep in practice. I liked how Dragonblink described it as a good mix of writing for yourself as well as for others. With the “for others” – in some senses that’s purely informative, in that I’m sharing things I would like the others know, say for example a change of email address, or with the NY group, a proposal to get together for drinks on a particular date. In another sense, the “for others” also helps me with my writing, in a way that is probably not obvious to the people reading – there have been times that I have been very surprised with the reaction to something I have written, and I think it helps me to better assemble my thoughts and ideas in the future.
I do keep a lot of my entries “friends only,” which means that one must be on my friends list to see the posts. I do this not because I’m talking smack – it’s because I frequently mention Mr. Del and other family members and friends, and it feels more appropriate to me to keep some margin of control over the degree to which this stuff is floating around on the intraweb. I’m not saying anything scandalous, it’s more along the lines of “Hey, my little brother got a great new job at such and such place!” While my little bro knows that I talk about him and his place of employment to people I know personally, I feel more comfortable not broadcasting his name and the name of his employer to the world at large.
[sub]Okay, I confess that I occasionally talk about my mother and her general loopiness in such a way that she would be mortified if I knew I was sharing it with people I met over the gasp internet. But really, it’s cheaper than therapy.[/sub]
This is my LiveJournal. If you are clicking through on this link, you will only see my public entries. If you manage to read it without dying of boredom, and are an LJer, I’d be happy to add you to my friends list. I can’t promise it will be less boring, though.
People who want to keep online journals could just use Geocities or some other free homepage service, but LiveJournal can save you some trouble when it comes to coding. For instance, it lets you use “calendar view” or “subject view” for old entries. It’s possible to adjust the privacy settings on your LiveJournal so no one else can see it, so some people must use the thing as just a private electronic journal.
Other people use their LiveJournals to keep in touch with friends and family around the world. A lot of my friends in college had LiveJournals, but I only set one up for myself when I had to leave school for half a semester to have an operation. I knew my buddies at school would be worried about me and would want to know how my recovery was progressing, and I figured creating a LiveJournal account to keep them updated would be easier than sending out a bunch of e-mails all the time.
Now that most of my old school friends and I have graduated, it’s easy to use LiveJournal to keep track of what they’re up to. They’re all in my “Friends” list, so I can view everyone’s recent entries with one mouse click. (Quality and content vary with the friend; I’m primarily interested in hearing about their jobs and families and other slices of daily life, but one only posts to complain about her boyfriend and others mostly do jokes and quizzes.) They can easily see what I’ve been doing too. If I had a journal on an independent site they’d have to remember to check regularly if I’ve posted anything recently, but on LiveJournal they know that any new entries of mine will show up on their “Friends” page along with everyone else’s. I only post a few times a month, but I have posted from three continents, so I like to think my entries may be at least a little interesting to my buds. 
LiveJournal also has all kinds of communities on different subjects. I’ve never bothered with them, but a lot of my friends are members of various fan groups for musicians, actors, or TV shows. You can also enter a list of interests into your profile, and search the interests of other LiveJournal users or communities. For instance, I just ran a search on “Theda Bara” for you and saw that she’s been entered as an interest of 25 communities (ranging from “Silent film fans” to “DeathPUNK”) and 330 users.
chazo, Cartooniverse- If you’d read this thread at all, you’d understand that those trash-talking communities are but a miniscule part of the LJ experience, and are blindingly easy to ignore.
If you don’t like LJ for whatever reason, that’s fine, but in the interest of fighting ignorance, I think it’s disingenuous to pretend that LJ is this horrid wasteland of bad people based on a single community.
On LiveJournal, there is almost no moderation of content. So yes, you will read some very nasty things, posted anonymously, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. But you do not have to come in to contact with it in any way, shape, or form, ever. Many of us (“us” being the SDMB contingent as well as the ~3,171,504 other LJ users) will never have to deal with any of that nastiness. The only time I’ve run into nastiness was in that community. Now I avoid it. Problem solved. If I were ever to be a topic of discussion there, it’d be there whether I read it or not, and I don’t think many people give any credence to anything posted anonymously anyway.
I’m sure there’s plenty of things to be critical of on LJ, but don’t give the impression that joining will delve you into some fetid wasteland of supposed humanity. You have 100% control over your journal and what you do and see on LJ.
It would sort of be like people saying the SDMB was a horrible place because of (and ONLY because of) the five worst pit threads we’ve ever had. Only that, IMO, would be a MORE fair characterization than the one you’re making about LJ.
I actually thought about this a bit before writing a reply. I disagree respectfully. You cannot take away the chain of events. A Doper asked me to visit SDMB LJ, and register so I could partake. I did so. I looked around. Did I know what LJ was? I did not. No clue. Was I exposed to some cut and paste personal version? I was not. I visited the SDMB LJ. Same as anyone who does.
My impressions are what they are. -shrug- Having said that, I surely see your point- the SDMB LJ is one small application of what is obviously as highly customizable and preferentially defined a medium as say, IM’s or private chat rooms. I get it, I really do.
I based my post on the SDMB LJ.
I understand that you were linked to (one of) the related LJ(s) for the SDMB community, and not the (more prevalent) personal journals, so I understand your chain of events thing. It would be like LINKING someone to one of our worst pit threads, and expecting them to find the interesting stuff on their own. No big deal.
I just wanted to correct the notion that many people (well, at least the OP) had that that was ALL THERE WAS to LJ, that it was basically an unmoderated, anonymous (in some cases) pit.
Tee hee. You guys are soooooo defensive about this medium. Reminds me of back when I was addicted to an AOL chat room, and had to patiently explain to frothy-mouthed googley-eyed friends and family that it was not a meeting place for stalkers, killers and n’er do wells. ( Unfortunately, it turned out to be just that but that’s besides the point 
).
I honestly accept the notion that this is a highly keen idea, with a lot of flexibility, use and private sharing of ideas and feelings. It sounds very alluring. I was just feeling insistent that I make clear that this is what I was shown, and this is what my impression was of what I was shown. I do appreciate the fact that in essence, I was shown an SDMB LJ Pit kind of affair.
–puts tin foil funnel firmly back onto frontal lobe, curls back up into fetal position–