Explore LJ - threat or menace?

[mdlbear]

As most of my flist probably knows by now, LJ has added a controversial new feature called Explore LJ - you can see the actual page here. It looks a lot like Google News, only restricted to LJ.

Although I think it's a transparent attempt to monetize user-generated content, I don't think it's a privacy violation, and I'm not going to opt out. Here's why: I want my blog to be noticed.

Sitting in my front closet right now are about 500 copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song. If a few thousand more people get pointed to it and a few dozen of them decide to buy a copy, I'm not going to complain. At all.

For similar reasons, my LJ is indexed on Google and any other search engine that cares to drink from the firehose of LJ's live feed. I rarely friends-lock, and consider anything I post to be public. I have a long history of this, going back to my days in alt.callahans, and it's too late to back out now even if I wanted to.

(I'm in the process of setting up a private journal, where I can control access separately to every post. That's different: it'll be encrypted, unsearchable by anyone but me, and on servers totally under my control.)

Damn the torpedos search engines, full speed ahead!