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!

Comments

[mithriltabby]

That’s pretty much my view. If I post it publicly on my LJ, I don’t mind if someone else comes up with ways for people who want to read the sort of things I post to find them. Anything I don’t want people seeing, I mark Friends-only. I did suggest that LJ notify people if a post is going to be featured in Explore LJ, so a journal owner will have warning that they’re going to get a flood of commentors.

[mdlbear]

That's a good idea. Hopefully they'll do that, and hopefully they'll do it via email instead of (or more likely in addition to) their stupid messaging system.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Understand your point of view. My point in blogging here is to get ideas out there, not eyeballs, and yet keep a certain detachment between person and idea. This is my idea of Poor Richard's Almanac....

I still say it should be opt-in for paid members. I totally understand them doing it opt-out for folks as are not otherwise coughing up dough... but if I'm paying good money for something I don't want it changing without a chance to feed back. If somebody makes a change to software I don't like across an upgrade, I don't have to upgrade. (cf. Quicken.) If somebody makes a change to blogware? I don't get a choice. Bad juju. (My alternate mail service tests things on beta servers and asks for feedback before rolling live. I like them (http://www.fastmail.fm). (/andy_rooney))

It's the continually being yanked around like this that has me actively beginning to put stuff elsewhere, and just feed it back here with RSS. (And it occurs to me that I discovered yesterday that I actually have yet another blog that I'm not using atall... methinks my geekery stuff may end up over there. Film at 11.)

Glad to hear your private-blog project is in progress, though. As soon as you have something even vaguely releasable, let me know... how much of a footprint are you planning for it to take? More towards bloxom or more towards LJ?

[mdlbear]

I can certainly understand that point of view too, though posting stuff on a public server owned by a third party doesn't really give you much expectation of privacy. It's not quite Usenet, but it's right up there.

The private-blog project actually splits into two parts. The personal-blog stuff is even lighter weight than blosxom: build static pages and push them out to one or more servers. The private stuff is a little heavier on both sides, because ideally everything is encrypted from end to end. That means that you need a decrypting proxy on the client side.

The intermediate form -- which is what I'll do first -- keeps the working directory in the clear and encrypts it when you publish. For that one I'll keep a decrypting proxy on my home system and let people connect via https.

[kyrielle]

Yeah, I sort of figure public posts are public. My only objection to the Explore LJ thing is that it seems to be pretty crappy at picking what to show, and I can't see why anyone would be interested in trying to find things via it twice. ;) But, such is life. And if it were "opt in" instead of "opt out" they'd never hit critical mass because many people would never bother.

Still, some way in the interface to say "this post might be of interest to Explore LJ" or "this post won't be of interest to Explore LJ" might be nice. It might even reduce the drivel if enough people used it, tho' I wouldn't bet on that!