livejournal

The TouchGraph LiveJournal Browser is a rather pretty toy. It uses LJ’s machine-readable user information to plot nice graphs of the friend and interest relationships (if you just want to see the friend relationships, nudge the max and min interest popularity settings so they’re close together). Double-click on another user and their friends appear, with the graph shuffling itself around to accommodate them. Load up someone with lots of friends and watch the thing grind to a halt. Super.

It’s written in Java, so it runs on my Mac (and presumably under Linux). If you’re not on Windows, use the command line from the batch file which comes with it, but replace the semi-colons in the class path with colons. It is, as numerous people have said, all good.

Had a gluttonous weekend, dining in a posh restaurant (well, it was a special occasion) and going to PaulB’s barbeque. My stomach has just about recovered now.

I’ve become a paid user of LiveJournal. As well as making me feel good about contributing to the upkeep of the place, this means that the RSS feed now contains the entire entry. As I can control the DNS for noctua.org.uk, that also means I can do:

blog.noctua.org.uk. 68048 IN CNAME livejournal.com.

so that http://blog.noctua.org.uk/ becomes an alias for my LiveJournal. That’s not very useful for existing LJers, as you won’t see friends only stuff even if you’ve logged in. But the URL is shorter, and it provides some sort of future proofing (not that I’m thinking of leaving LJ, of course).

It looks like there are many other exciting things one can do as a paid user. New toy!

Danny O’Brien of NTK writes about the mixing of public, private and secret conversations which occurs on the web. It’s in reaction to yet another “look, these people are sad” article in The Register, but it goes on to say some interesting things:

My God, people say, how can Livejournallers be so self-obsessed? Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won’t they all shut up?

The answer why they won’t shut up is – they’re not talking to you. They’re talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google. They’re having a bad day. They’re writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you’re standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who’s obsessed now?

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I publish an Atom feed of my comments on other people’s public posts. My comments on locked entries are not published. The program which produces the feed periodically checks that entries are still public, and treats entries which are new to it as private for a few hours in case they were made public accidentally. The feed is marked with various runes to ward off indexing by Google or other feed searching sites.

Still, if you don’t want the feed to include my comments on your public postings, you can opt out by filling in this poll. You’ll need to be logged in as the journal you want to opt-out. If you want to undo the opt-out, you can fill out the poll again and uncheck the box.

The opt-out is automatically checked once per day, so please allow that long for changes to take effect.

[ LJ Poll 1257467 ]