LJ vs Blogger

I have a LiveJournal, I even have a Yahoo360 account (look, I was just curious ok) and now I’m here.

A friend just asked what the advantage of Blogger was over LiveJournal…

Cue introspection on the purpose of blogging.

It’s easy to look down on LiveJournal as the repository of teen angst but in all fairness there are a number of interesting writers lurking over there as well, and for many people the community and friends aspects work wonderfully, but it was the friends feature that ultimately led to me moving over here.

I’ve had my LJ for three years and while I’ve never been a prolific poster the fact that I’ve only made 12 posts there this year (two of which were picture posts and one was saying I’d moved here) led me to realise that it really wasn’t fulfilling my needs.

“But why” you vaguely mutter… there’s a Dashboard widget for it so posting’s a no-brainer, it’s pretty functional as blog systems go, I can keep up to date with other people’s blogs easily and I know who’s reading mine.

And therein lies the problem. The friends feature means that I know exactly who will see what I’m writing. And consciously or otherwise I am aware of that as I write and it affects what I choose to write about and the style in which I do it. I doubt that any of the entries here would have made it onto LJ; they’d just have stayed in my mind. Here, I have no idea who, apart from CodePope, is reading and that’s fine with me. Even if someone comments on an entry that’s no guarantee that they’ll come back to read any of the others.

I don’t have to try to be witty or erudite (which is just as well) I can just brain dump whatever occurs to me whenever I feel like it. And I find that I’ll be pondering something and will make a mental note to blog it far more often than I ever did on LJ.

Ultimately I blog for me and me alone. If anyone else finds it interesting, amusing or otherwise worthy of spending a few minutes reading then that’s fine. If someone comments here that’s fine too, and in many ways it’s far more satisfying receiving a comment from a total stranger than from someone I know (especially as the buggers rarely commented on my LJ, not that I was ever a prolific commenter on theirs, but the psychology of commenting on blogs is a different one from that of writing a blog).

So here I am and here I will stay… as long as Blogger doesn’t implement friends functionality anyway.

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