Blogging about Blogging.

[swestrup]

So, I've been thinking about things that LiveJournal needs in order to give a more fulfilling and rewarding blogging experience, or something like that.

I already mentioned a bunch of stuff in my journal here and here but mostly here (friends only) but I've had some new ideas:

I was thinking about a few simple additions, like a way to cross index old journals. Often when reading someone's past journal, they've referred to 'current events' in someone else's journal, but finding what was current in a third party's journal when a particular post was written is not easy. That could be fixed.

I've also been thinking about the whole 'Memories' thing, and how its just not a good indexing system. That could be fixed too.

Then I had a really good idea. From time to time I've had friends, friends, and friends (to point out just a few) who's blogs are NOT on livejournal, and which I don't often read because it isn't as convenient as I would like. Obviously what the world needs is a metablog that allows you to seamlessly integrate comments and journal entries from all and sundry, even if the blogs themselves are hosted in separate locations. What with the advent of RSS and ATOM, I don't think this would even be too hard to do.

While you were at it, you could host native journals (so it would be a blog AND a metablog) and you could publish a standard interblog interface so anyone who wanted to could write an already-compatible blog. Since no one will bother at first, you'll have to write a dozen screen-scrapers and RSS digesters to handle all of the various interfaces you'll have to connect to, but I bet the results would be poplular...

... And now I see its time to head to IKEA. Ciao

Comments

[kishiriadgr.livejournal.com]

Metablog: agreed. I have friends who are on Blogger and I ask them why because you can't comment on anything there unless you also have a Blogger account.

[taxlady.livejournal.com]

What you need for LJ to be a metablog is for someone with a paid account to make syndication accounts here on LJ, out of the RSS or Atom feeds of the journals you want to read. Then you can add those syndicated accounts to your friends page. You could also get an RSS reader. The only specific RSS reader I have heard of is Pluck, but I'm pretty sure it only works with Internet Exploder.

I wonder if there is a plugin for Firefox and/or Mozilla. It's something I plan on researching when I have a bit of time.

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

my blog (http://www.figuiere.net/hub/blog/) is available as RSS. I myself use a Straw (http://www.nongnu.org/straw/) a RSS aggregator, and my blog is available on a few "Planet" site that are basically community meta-blog, like planet GNOME (http://planet.gnome.org/) and PlaNit (http://pla.nit.ca/).

As for LJ, I wish I could set my LiveJournal to be a pull of my RSS feed, but apparently I can't. I'll try to implement cross-posting for LJ like I need to do for Advogato (http://www.advogato.org/) where my blog used to be. (http://www.advogato.org/person/hub/). In that case I'll happily cross-post.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

They're working on a cross-blog authentication system for LJ whereby any other site on the LJ codebase can add and comment onto any other. Not quite universal, but it's something.