Livejournal is the Most Personal Online Journal
Maximum Control, Unlimited Protected List, and Tons of Communities
Sep 17, 2009
Between blogspot, wordpress, xanga, and livejournal the latter is the most effective for ranting, personal insight, or other kinds of intimate writing that one would put in a journal or protected post. Livejournal can boast to having over 2 million active accounts and 4,230,000 more google hits than xanga (a more personal journal-type site than blogspot or wordpress).
Unlimited Members for Protected Posting
An online journal entry can be made either public (open for anyone to see), protected (open for certain viewers to see), or private (open for only the writer to see). Xanga, blogspot, and livejournal require a person to have an account with them (blogspot only requires a google account) in order to be eligible to view a user's protected posting. When that person is added to a user's friends list, or protected list, then he/she is part of the exclusive group that can see a user's protected entries.
Xanga only allows ten users to be added to a person's protected list, whereas livejournal allows unlimited users for protected postings. Blogspot, however, cannot switch between public, protected, or private. Users can make the whole blog public, private, or protected, but not mixed. Wordpress has the ability to make any post public, private, or protected by password. Those to whom the user gives the password, then, can see the posts.
Unlimited Custom Friend Groups
Xanga only allows one group of ten users for protected postings. While this group can be edited indefinitely, it applies to all protected postings. And blogspot cannot change the privacy settings for the entire blog once it has been created.
Livejournal, on the other hand, has an unlimited amount of custom protected groups where the user can decide which viewers can see which postings. For example, a user might have a group of college friends, high school friends, and special interest friends, and be able to share information with only his/her special interest friends or only his/her high school friends in any given post. This feature is very helpful to people with varied clusters of friends who have different standards or expectations of people.
Also, more than one custom group can be selected to view the entry. But if a user is included in one group and excluded from the other, that user will still have access to the entry, so post with discretion.
Various Communities
Livejournal has tens of thousands of communities. Typing a one-word search term of interest on the site will usually yield over 300 groups. There is even a group called Rainbow Arc which hosts the interests of LGBT Christian furies ("and allies"). After hearing about this community, one might say that livejournal caters to any possible interest or identity.
Between wordpress, blogspot, xanga, and livejournal, livejournal has the most social customizing options, allowing a user to be more expressive with no fear of the entries reaching the wrong eyes (except for hackers; but everyone fears them).
 |
