The history of LiveJournal
Neva Chonin interviews Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator (at the age of 18) of LiveJournal, now a community of 8 million users. Chonin notes the differences between LiveJournalers and bloggers:
There are differences between the worlds of blogs and LJs. LiveJournal’s user base skews young, drawing a large proportion of teenagers, whereas blogging tends to attract users in their late 20s and early 30s. Additionally, LJ is seen as a private space for networking and interpersonal discourse; blogs are viewed as one-person publications directed toward a larger audience. A growing number of people maintain both an LJ and a blog, but the two camps traditionally don’t mix, with some bloggers dismissing Journalers as trivial kids and Journalers mocking bloggers as wannabe Web stars.
Fitzpatrick and the Trotts hope to erase some of those assumptions, especially after Six Apart introduces its Comet platform — expected out next year — which will combine the public platform of blogging, the community interaction of LiveJournal and the networking of sites like my MySpace.com.
In looking at the genres of websites, blogs, and other online environments, we might expect interaction among them (and print) that generates new genres.
