LiveJournalism

I remember attending Clay Shirky’s talk about LiveJournal at last year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I wasn’t particularly interested in the topic; I’d just ducked in there to avoid John “Captain Crunch” Draper, who’d been hounding me throughout the entire conference to help him do some “energy transfer work” in my room. Eager to avoid a tear-filled session where I’d have to play-act the “bad touch” incident at a therapist’s with anatomically-correct dolls, I thought I’d go see what insights Clay had come up with in his months of LiveJournal research.

(A friend later said: “If you’d been in the hacker community as long as I have, you’d have known that Crunch was a creepy gay old man,” to which I replied “If you’d been in the having-a-life community as long as I have, you’d be able to figure it out pretty quickly.” Nerd.)

At some point, Clay was talking about the kind of stuff that people typically wrote in their LiveJournals and I quipped to someone beside me: “LJ people. Yeesh.”

If the New Girl Situation is some kind of karmic payback for the LiveJournal dis, I would like to ask the cosmos: “I think my account’s all settled, don’t you?”

If you’ve been reading the comments from the New Girl story, you’ve probably seen comments from Mean One, someone who’d been burned by New Girl far worse than I was. She’s created a LiveJournal just to tell her own New Girl story.

I didn’t know there was a blog that chronicled LiveJournal drama, but such a beast exists: LJdrama.org. Naturally, the New Girl drama did not escape their notice.