LiveJournal is the latest social networking site to confirm a denial-of-service attack, company officials confirmed Thursday.

LiveJournal was hit with the DDoS attack at approximately 6 AM Pacific time, a spokesman said in an e-mail. The company cannot 100 percent confirm that it is the same attack that plagued Twitter this morning, but "it would be a huge coincidence if they aren't tied to one another," he said.

Things are now back to normal on LiveJournal.com, the spokesman said.

[S]urely the activity of these blogs--let alone their present inactivity--has never been of any real consequence.

Apart from a very small percentage which are informative, original or entertaining, they have little or no value. They are vanity publishing, only made feasible by the removal of costs.

The fact that their creators appear to be giving up on them is hardly surprising, given the amount of time they take to write, to discover and to read. Only a tiny proportion of any working population has this time to spare.

Worthwhile blogs--and there are many of them around--tend, according to my own anecdotal evidence, to be linked to well-known organisations able to provide time and resources, or they have become professional concerns in their own right.

They are also now far more easily discovered, thanks to websites such as Twitter, which enable filtering and highlighting of links to relevant content, according to users’ set criteria.

[R]ecently--over the past six months--I've noticed a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. (I'm defining a blog here as an individual site, whether on Blogger or Wordpress or an individual domain, with regular entries.) Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn't think we'd suddenly become dull. Nor was it for want of searching: mining for blog comments, I use Icerocket.com. Technorati.com and Google's Blogsearch.

Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they've all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com--though it's still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it's a "retweet", echoing the headline. The New York Times also noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about "Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest", which pointed to Technorati's 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, "that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned".

I see it: NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn't been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier--and it's to easier things that people are turning.

springheel_jack

What's been bugging me is that this is a Big Geek Culture -slash- Fandom Event, and it brings back all my puzzlement and difficulties and frustrations with Geek Culture and Fandom.

There's two alternatives, I guess. LJ was not always one hundred percent fannish, but it is now, the non-fan types having gone to other services as LJ's cachet has disappeared. I have mixed feelings about the whole idea of 'fandom', insofar as I understand it at all. And I'm not really a fan - I don't feel that I imbibe culture in that way, exactly. So while I'm interested in fandom as a cultural phenomenon, as a way of being related to culture, I'm not terribly interested in fandom's day-to-day activity on its own account. In fact I'm bored by it.

springheel_jack

In an about-face following a torrent of online protests, Facebook is backing off a change in its user policies while it figures how best to resolve questions like who controls the information shared on the social networking site.

The site, which boasts 175 million users from around the world, had quietly updated its terms of use — its governing document — a couple of weeks ago. The changes sparked an uproar after popular consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com pointed them out Sunday, in a post titled Facebook's New Terms Of Service: 'We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.'

Facebook has since sought to reassure its users — tens of thousands of whom had joined protest groups on the site — that this is not the case. And on Wednesday morning, users who logged on to Facebook were greeted by a message saying that the site is reverting to its previous terms of use policies while it resolves the issues raised.

Facebook spelled out, in plain English rather than the legalese that prompted the protests, that it "doesn't claim rights to any of your photos or other content. We need a license in order to help you share information with your friends, but we don't claim to own your information."

Tens of thousands of users joined protest groups on Facebook, saying the new terms grant the site the ability to control their information forever, even after they cancel their accounts.

This prompted a clarification from Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, who told users in a blog post Monday that "on Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with."

Mr. Zuckerberg, who started Facebook while still in college, also acknowledged that a "lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you."

But this wasn't enough to quell user protests, and the site also created a group called "Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities," designed to let users give input on Facebook's terms of use. It also apologized for what it called "the confusion around these issues."

"We never intended to claim ownership over people's content even though that's what it seems like to many people," read a post from Facebook on the bill of rights page.

Some Facebook critics condemn the activity--or even commenting on it--as an exercise in narcissism. Others say the Facebook-fueled disclosures draw far-flung friends closer than they ever would be otherwise and, sometimes, make for a good laugh.

It does seem to beat sending each other pretend cocktails (another preoccupation of Facebook’s 150 million users). But most everyone agrees it is taking up an inordinate amount of time. "People,’’ said Dr. Fogg, "are thinking very carefully about their lists."

The more popular your Facebook persona, the logic goes, the more you will be able to get your Facebook friends to read your blog or buy your book or support your cause. But crafting one is a delicate process, especially condensed in list-form.

How to exalt your achievements while appearing humble? How to convey your essential originality while coming off as reassuringly familiar? How to illuminate without oversharing?

lord_whimsy

My initial impulse was to start backing off and exporting my six year-old LiveJournal, but at the last moment, I decided to cancel these safeguards. It felt too much like backpedaling to an old media mindset, a craving for permanence in an impermanent medium. Emotionally I wanted to save all the nonsense I've posted here--some of which have documented my life over that period. But philosophically I'm appalled at the idea, since the ephemeral nature of a blog/journal/blogue is part of its beauty--lends it a bittersweet tang, if you will. And besides, I won't revisit 90% of those posts, anyway.

So what are your thoughts? When the time comes, will you embalm your LJ or will you let it die a "natural" death?

Social-media pioneer LiveJournal is the latest company to announce a round of layoffs, trimming down its employee head count in its San Francisco and Moscow offices.

A statement from the company came after a rumor on gossip blog Gawker suggested that a shocking number of LiveJournal employees--20 out of 28--had been cut. LiveJournal clarified that it was "about a dozen" cuts, amounting to about a fifth of the company.

"LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration, and the customer service teams will remain in the United States," the release explained. "LiveJournal's global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the U.S. and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal."

Yahoo veteran Matthew Berardo, who was hired as general manager of the service less than a year ago, was affected by the layoff.

LiveJournal was founded nearly a decade ago by OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick, who sold the company to blog software firm Six Apart. But that led to widespread reports of management difficulties, and late in 2007, Six Apart resold LiveJournal, phenomenally popular in Russia, to the Moscow-based software company SUP.

zarq

Moscow-based SUP announced Monday it has bought blog-hosting firm LiveJournal as part of a plan to cultivate an international community of people that author such online diaries.

The Russian media company said it acquired LiveJournal from Six Apart Ltd. in San Francisco and that it will operate the blogging firm from this California city.

A party celebrating the deal is planned for Monday night in a chic San Francisco restaurant and the guest list includes the Six Apart mascot, a live goat.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SUP began licensing LiveJournal blog-managing software from Six Apart slightly more than a year ago.

The Russian component of LiveJournal nearly doubled in users during that time period and now represents 28 percent of LiveJournal's more than 18 million monthly visitors, according to SUP.

"Having gotten to know LiveJournal in Russia over the past year we see enormous potential in developing the business worldwide," said SUP chief executive Andrew Paulson.

"We believe this is a great opportunity."

Along with a new management team, SUP promises "significant new investment" in LiveJournal.

Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in 1999 as a way to let his high school friends stay abreast of his life. Six Apart bought the company that operated LiveJournal in 2005.

Fitzpatrick recently left Six Apart for a job with Northern California Internet colossus Google but will remain on a LiveJournal advisory board created to oversee the firm's transition to SUP.

Online media company SUP was founded in 2006 with Russian capital and an international management team.

SUP operates popular Russian social networking website LiveJournal.ru; sports and entertainment website Championat.ru, and online advertising operations +SOL and Victory S.A.

arpad

• alexpgp checks out claims that Livejournal is set to die out and finds them, at best, unconvincing.


• Richard at Castrovalva suggests that the alternative to indulgent consumerism isn't going to be rural simplicity, or, at least, a rural simplicity that won't owe a lot to Sparta's determinedness.


• Daniel Drezner points out that, whatever Iran may be doing in Iraq, its role in Afghanistan is far more constructive than Pakistan's.


• Nick Moles reveals the origins of Fanta in Nazi Germany.


• Joel at Far Outliers compares black resorts in the United States with the white missionary resorts of his Japanese childhood.


• Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty observes the peculiar take on social engineering of a Protestant seminary that fired a woman from its faculty of theology because women shouldn't be doing that sort of thing.


• John J. Reilly at The Long View wonders just what sort of ruins our civilization will leave behind.

lj_biz

* What criteria will be used to determine whether a journal is "Russian" or not?
It will be a combination of if you write primarily in Cyrillic, have listed your location as a country from the former USSR, or use a Russian browser.