Matthew's Journal

Another machine I have an account on has recently created a "journals" newsgroup, which I will refer to here as cabal.journals. The idea is that cabal users will post their lj/blog/mono/whatever diary entries into it along with a subject-line tag to say whose they are. So, if my username on cabal was herringl, this entry would appear as something like:

From: localpart@domain
Newsgroups: cabal.journals
Subject: [herringl] cabal.journals
...

And any comments would start a usenet-style thread.

I was initially a little uncomfortable with the idea, so I thought I'd set down what I thought about how I use LJ, and how that interacts with such nntp-gateways. During the gestation of this essay, OpenID has come along, so excuse me if my thoughts about that are a little dysmature, as it were.

So, what do I use LJ for? I can divide my entries up into a few broad categories:

1. Essays on things I consider important or interesting (e.g. the comments on the Lancet's paper on the death penalty)
   
2. Essays on professional topics (e.g. the organic milk rant)
   
3. More or less lengthy/interesting comments on what's going on in my life
   
4. Plugs for events or church services
   
5. Writings about what I'm doing at work
   
6. Requests for help
   
7. The odd meme
   
8. Keeping up with my friends, both "real" and "online"
   

Now some of these are obviously things that I want to achieve wide readership, so are posted publically. Some of them I don't really care who reads them (so are posted publically). Some I want to be extra sure that googling parents, future employers, current co-workers and so on can't read, so get friends-locked. Some I only want a few close friends to read, so can be posted to small friends-filters.

cabal.journals provides a means whereby people who don't want to use their own RSS aggregator of choice can read my public entries. I don't feel I can post any of the categories of friends-locked posts there since I don't know all the people with accounts on cabal, and I know that at least some of the accounts on there are pseudonyms. Also, while I can be pretty sure I'll never friend a co-worker on LJ, I can't really say to sysadmin@cabal "no, don't give that person an account because I don't want them to see bits of my journal". Furthermore, there's absolutely no way of restricting who can read my postings to cabal.journals, so I want to discourage people I actually know reading my witterings there, as they could read more of my LJ via a method where I can restrict readership (LJ or OpenID currently).

The downside of propagating articles to cabal.journals is that because the propagation technology is one-way, it means I have to go chasing after comments in more places than I do now, and that I might end up with two different conversations out of sync with each other in response to the same entry. Experience suggests that people aren't good at following instructions of the form "you can read this in this medium, but please go and comment on it over there". I clearly also have an interest in my friends maintaining journals in the same place, as it makes keeping up with them easier. If everyone I wanted to keep in touch with had LJs this would be ideal; blogs that can be syndicated to LJ are OK, but there's the faff about keeping up with comments (LJ doesn't currently extract comments from syndicated entries and put them into the LJ-feed).

OpenID will complicate matters, I think. If Fred is using blogspot, and starts wanting to OpenID-filter their posts, then the current LJ-feed mechanism is going to become inadequate (already, you can't usefully friends-lock an LJ-feed). OpenID should make it possible for people to read my LJ, including some friends-locked posts, without them needing an LJ-account, although I'm not sure if this can actually be usefully made to work yet.

I should address some of the supposed advantages of cabal.journals. Firstly, it has been opined that LJ-comments are a pretty ropey way of holding a discussion, particularly between third parties - if you're not the journal's owner, you can't get LJ to email you all comments to an entry (and AIUI the RSS support for comments on LJ isn't useful), so keeping up with old discussions is hard. Also, the comments interface to LJ isn't great for large discussions. I must accept these criticisms of LJ. I think the answer is to fix LJ, though. Many of my LJ-fiends don't have access to cabal, so LJ is currently the only place that discussion can carry on and be participated in by all readers of an entry. Maybe if it could be fixed such that comments went both ways that would help...

Also, it has been pointed out that some LJers have a very autocratic view of what goes on in their LJ, and will delete comments or whole entries on a whim, or if something someone says offends them. Also, users may be de-friended by someone, and then be unable to read the long insightful comment they left in a locked entry in that person's journal. This, I think, is a social problem. Whilst posting to cabal.journals would stop me deleting discussions on a whim, there would clearly have to exist a mechanism where I could require cabal's newsmaster to do so for me (if a commenter disclosed confidential information about me, for example), and that's a whole extra can of worms, unless the relevant policy is exceedingly well-written. So, dear reader, you'll have to take it on trust that I won't behave like an arsehole here ;)

In summary, I remain unconvinced that cabal.journals is not a bad idea. It addresses valid problems, but not in a manner that seems to be compatible with what I reasonably want to use my journal for.

[As an aside, I've added the facility for readers to tag my entries. Friends can create new tags and so on, too. Please don't abuse these powers.]