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What do you do when you want feedback...

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jeno:

--- Quote from: mightyutuvan on November 03, 2009, 01:33:47 PM ---I too have a question about LiveJournal (LJ).  I have noticed more than a few published authors use LJ.  Does it provide significantly different services than say Facebook or Google's Blogspot?  Is the choice technical (more services provided) or cultural (more authors join LJ because more authors are on LJ, kind of a self fullfilling prophecy)?

--- End quote ---


Honestly? A lot of published authors use LJ because they started on LJ, usually in some kind of fannish community. These are the authors who (unsurprisingly) know who to use LJ to its fullest advantage.  Check how many people are 'Friends' of this author's LJ. Hint - it's the number that starts with '6' and has three more digits after it. Some authors who aren't native to the LJ community may join LJ in order to connect to fans, but by and large they don't know how to use the platform to their advantage very well. Lots of times those journals float into obscurity in favor of an independent webpage.

Livejournal communities promote creativity to an insane degree, usually in fictional form.  If you write a story and it's really, really good, you can get  nearly a thousand comments on it , which is pretty awesome for one story. (And that's just the people who comment - lurkers outnumber posters like, 5 to 1.)

But even for people who aren't BNFs (Big Name Fans), whenever you post an entry, you almost always get instant feedback from people on your flist (Friends List). That's more of a cultural thing in the fannish communities - it's good manners to give feedback, even if not every one does it. And the better you get, the more people will read your stuff. And they'll tell their friends, who tell their friends, who make public recs, and so on and so on.

LJ is different from Facebook in that LJ promotes a hell of a lot more creativity in its users, firstly based on its Journal platform and then enhanced by the culture of the fannish community. Its different from Blogspot/Wordpress because 1) there aren't nearly as many widely connected users on those services and 2) the comment system allows for more direct and informal interaction between users.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
Basically, LJ is all about the text.  It's a format that enables the long thoughtful essay over the short-attention-span back and forth much more so than facebook or myspace; and many of the circles I move in there are people who moved there from Usenet, back in the deeps of prehistory when text was the medium available. 

(Don't talk to me about Twitter.  The average sentence that comes out of my mouth won't fit in 140 characters, let alone a reasoned argument to make any point worth making.)

jeno:
Yup. A whole bunch of people moved en masse from Usenet to mailing lists to Livejournal.

SCARPA:
I dont know anything about the other formats / systems but I have had great experience posting chapters as notes on my facebook page. Comments are general in nature not line items but it works great for what I am looking for. For more intimate commentary I deal with editors I know on an individual basis.

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