On journaling
Generally I use this thing to post off-hand thoughts and whatnot and do all my decent posting in other people's journals.There's reasons for this - partly because I've spent some time looking for appropriate communities and those I find really amusing (lj user="umokay", lj user="motherbitches",lj user="burgar")- I could dwell on all sorts of negative things but I've worked reasonably hard to come to a kind of peace with as much as I can. I don't like sharing all kinds of personal details about myself and I prefer to keep my conflicts kept in a manageable way and in their appropriate forum. I realize that that can all make this page some dry reading. Oh well. I will do some major league ranting at some point but I find it a bit difficult to stay angry long enough to write long cohesive diatribes. Historically I've used journals to keep up idea fragments for various creative pursuits, obviously that also isn't appropriate here (and there's certainly no collaborative tools). I suppose for me anyway that (live)journaling has become more building my own community out of the fabrics provided ,which while unintentional, certainly isn't a bad thing. It's heartwarming to know that there's more sarcastic misanthropic smarty-pants motherfuckers out there that get "it".
I think that there's a bunch of ways to better build communities and sites like this and I'm going to share some of them:
1. Lists of recent posts by username ala ezboard et al.
2. Better code to properly nest comments - something more akin to Slashdot for example.
3. A sort of internal IM to leave messages that don't fit the usual (e.g. "email me your #, address,whatever")
4. When doing a search for communities - or joining one - an intelligent suggestion of what other communities you might be interested in.
5. Collaborative tools such as whiteboards and what not to do artistic work and brainstorming.
6. Better matching tools by region,interest etc.
More later when I edit this. Feel free to add your own.
New: 7. Instead of having to have several journals for different subjects or directions a way to group journal entries and interests so that those that share them can see it and others can't. Seems like it would eat up less bandwidth.
I think that there's a bunch of ways to better build communities and sites like this and I'm going to share some of them:
1. Lists of recent posts by username ala ezboard et al.
2. Better code to properly nest comments - something more akin to Slashdot for example.
3. A sort of internal IM to leave messages that don't fit the usual (e.g. "email me your #, address,whatever")
4. When doing a search for communities - or joining one - an intelligent suggestion of what other communities you might be interested in.
5. Collaborative tools such as whiteboards and what not to do artistic work and brainstorming.
6. Better matching tools by region,interest etc.
More later when I edit this. Feel free to add your own.
New: 7. Instead of having to have several journals for different subjects or directions a way to group journal entries and interests so that those that share them can see it and others can't. Seems like it would eat up less bandwidth.