Aug | 03 | 2006

Checking out blogging services: Livejournal

Posted by Professor as Blog Tutorial, Creating a Blog, Hosting

Thinking of blogging? There are many services out there and you might want to check out some of the commonly used ones. Livejournal (or LJ) is one of the popular ones. There are people who think that it is mainly for the young people but it is not always so.

Maybe it’s a perception that exists because of the name. Livejournal — it sounds a bit too much like a diary? Maybe. But you could learn a lot about socializing on the Internet through blogs on LJ.

Different kind of Livejournal accounts: Basic, Early Adopter, Plus, Paid, and Permanent.

If you’d like to give blogging on LJ a try, you could go for the Basic account or the Plus account. You’d have the basic features like blogging, using avatars/user pictures, basic editing of your blog layout… The Plus account which is also free gives you more options though. Like keeping an online scrapbook. One of the evident differences between using the Basic and Plus accounts would be the presence of ads on the Plus account blogs.

Livejournal is nifty because for people who are new to blogging, you immediately get the chance to blog without having to worry about tweaking your layouts because the ones available are quite pretty as they come. And there are even communities (groups of Livejournal users) who give out help with tweaking layouts for free.

One of the blogging services that easily showed me that you could have communities through blogging is Livejournal. They actually have accounts for communities. It’s like you are posting on bulletin boards but you do it from your Livejournal user page. Or your post to Livejournal interface. You could simply select where you will post it: your personal blog or a particular community blog.

People who have been blogging way back in 2001 would probably say that Livejournal is one of the first hosted blogging services that they enjoyed using. (You could check out how LJ started.) It is very easy to connect with people through it and reading aggregated blogs through a page of your contacts or LJ friends is really neat. Also having an option to have your thoughts in private is good. (That or you could set filters as to who will be the ones who could read them.)

I actually recommend LJ to a lot of my friends, especially those who mainly blog to keep in touch with their family and friends. That way, they could set certain access levels to their blogs, especially when they want to share something a bit more personal. But as I said earlier, it doesn’t always have to be something like a diary you keep. It could be a way to track what’s up in your community.

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