Chad Orzel has a complaint about LiveJournal culture:
[P]eople in LiveJournal land have never really grasped the concept of the permanent link. Possibly because the default settings for the software make it fairly difficult to find the correct URL, or maybe because that have that little feature that automatically inserts a link given only a username. Whatever the reason, LiveJournal people tend to just link to the front page of whatever journal they’re pointing to, and it drives me nuts.
…
Why this particular behavior is so prevalent on LiveJournal, I have no idea. Regular blogs long ago got used to the idea of linking directly to archive pages, and while linkrot is still a problem (particularly since both Blogspot and Movable Type are prone to trashing site databases), they’re almost always good for a few weeks or a month. LiveJournal has never gotten the memo, though, and it’s maddening. If I go out of town for two days, I don’t even bother trying to follow links in most LiveJournal posts, because none of them go anywhere useful.
Hear, hear! And while we’re out saying mean things about the linking habits of LJers, allow me to air my pet peeve about LiveJournal culture: what’s with the whole, “May I link to this please?” You just posted a page on the public Internet for Pete’s sake. Linking is what pages on the public Internet are for.
The weirdest aspect of this little cultural tic is that unlike most other blogging systems, LiveJournal already offers built-in security settings, settings that enable you to mark posts as “private” so they’re unreadable and unlinkable for the outside world. Thanks to LiveJournal’s design, no LJ user ever has to post on the icky public Internet if they don’t want to.
Anyway. Asking “May I link to this?” is mousy and lame. Show a little testicular/ovarian fortitude and just link already.
Hmmm, two posts riffing off of Chad Orzel in a row. I should just rename this thing, “OrzelWatch”.
Yeah, if only LJ did an auto-archive of the posts and made them more link-friendly. Hrm. You can at least link to the date specific posts via lj/year/mo/day.
I think the hesitancy thing is related to the “friend” naming culture that I think they really screwed up. Should have called them associations or links or something else.
Though, I think its reasonable etiquette to let someone know you’re going to link to them, especially if say you’re going to tear them a new one or making any other commentary on their postings. A simple “interesting/look here” pointer, maybe not.
Not that that’s happened to me. Nopenopenope.
Agreed, that is reasonable etiquette. I find that the tech-savvier people will find my links by checking their referer logs… but I don’t think referer logs are exposed in a lot of hosted blog services — or if they are, people don’t know they’re there.
Way back at the Dawning of the Third Age of the Internet, some clever folks invented “trackbacks”, a way to automatically inform people that you had linked to them. But trackbacks have been a colossal failure. Not only are they even more spammy than comments, but even legit trackbacks end up just splattering your blog with incomprehensible, autogenerated, out-of-context text snippets. (Kind of like spam, actually.)
As for the “friends” terminology, yeah, that’s been a big source of trouble too. If you don’t want to follow someone’s blog anymore — “What? You unfriended me? How dare you!?” Et cetera. Names have power.
It is quite easy to link to a specific LJ post — you just navigate to the post and copy stuff out of the top bar. Or copy the link to the post by doing the right-click / copy-link-location thing. The only reason somebody wouldn’t do that is because they don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
Example of a link to a specific post, with its comments:
http://auros.livejournal.com/266939.html
You can alternately link to a page showing all the posts on a specific day:
http://auros.livejournal.com/2008/02/08/
Or you can even link into a specific comment thread:
http://auros.livejournal.com/266939.html?thread=1770683#t1770683
It may be the case that LJ users are, on average, less technically literate than users of stuff like MovableType. LJ is designed to make posting and commenting super-easy, allowing in the lowest common denominator. So maybe a lot of LJ users are clueless about the nature of links. But that’s a problem with the people, not the software. They’d be just as clueless if they were blogging on Blogger, ScienceBlogs, or whatever other platform.
Oh, and I could add: LJ still lets me use straight HTML tags to format my posts and create links — which is easier than whatever the heck it is you’re doing over here, these days.
As I might have mentioned before, Auros, I do not have a team of LiveJournal engineers at my disposal, nor do I have time to write my *own* code to:
* fix up people’s crappy HTML
* protect this site from XSS attacks
So I borrowed [someone else’s](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax). Anyone who does know HTML is smart enough to figure out how to use asterisks instead of . Anyone who doesn’t know HTML is unaffected. It’s all the same to the clam.
I have had this discussion before and will have it again: I do not think that the “friend” terminology is the fundamental problem with friending/defriending drama. If it was “interesting people” or “reading list” or “contact points,” you would get waily e-mails from people with insufficient sense of boundaries demanding to know why you didn’t think they were *interesting* any more, or why you didn’t want to read them, or why you wanted to fall out of contact. I really think that while there are one or two people who take it as a marker of Real True Friendship, mostly people with poor boundaries are pissed if you declare, even indirectly, that you don’t have the time or energy to deal with them that directly any more. And calling them “blogmatazz” or “roll call of doom” or “those who do not annoy the living crap out of me more than once or twice a day” would not change that.
You might be right about that. I remember that when blogs were starting to take off, people would get waily and dramatic over getting removed from someone else’s “blogroll”, a neutral term. But I always attributed that to the fact that the ur-bloggers skewed to the waily and dramatic, even more so that today’s bloggers.
err, … “*than* today’s bloggers.”
Blog, bloggy, blog. That’s another reason to be annoyed with the ur-bloggers, for adopting that hideous word. The only thing it’s got going for it is that it’s one syllable.
Ten years ago I created a web-ring for myself, claiming a need to have a limited selection of diaries (the term at the time) I read daily without needing to hunting around. I said I’d add diaries I liked and explained what that was, but clarified that I didn’t consider myself the arbiter of anything. I just didn’t have time to read 100 diaries a day, and here was my ring if anyone else wanted to look at those diaries, too.
All hell broke loose. People made really nasty comments about me. I got hate mail. I was assured I was responsible for ruining the inclusive, loving paradise of the tight-knit diary fandom.
Within a month there were a whole bunch of new web-rings by people who realized it was a really easy way to use technology to look at just the diaries they wanted to read. A couple years later the tech got even easier with blogs.
I think the word Friend was an unfortunate choice, but I agree with Marissa. It’s going to frost whoever you take off your blogroll, de-friend, whatever.
Will you link to my livejournal?
But yes, LiveJournal is the 9th Grader’s Trapper Keeper in the High School that is the internet.
I’ve linked to your LiveJournal, Jay, but I should note that you’ve never *once* written K.I.T. or B.F.F.!! on my Trapper Keeper at work.