Rain, Snow and Six Apart Buys LiveJournal
Well, such a boring and gloomy day it has been. Not enough snow to close school and not even cold enough to snow. But it's cold enough to use the "I'm freezing my ass off phrase", and nobody likes cold water down the neck, it just doesn't work. Snow goes "plop", rain goes "bang". I prefer the former. Everything went as slow as maple syrup, from the day to the computer I was working on. Don't ask me how a simple flyer came to be almost 300MB in Illustrator by simply adding drop shadows. Can't complain though I didn't really do much at work and got paid for it, but it looks like the "Dumbass for a Dollar" sale at the store is still going on.
Shall we continue on to some more interesting things?
Well, well, if Bank of America merging with Fleet wasn't enough, and you were tired of hearing that Sprint is merging with Nextel and that AT&T Wireless is now Cingular; here's another one for you - Six Apart buys LiveJournal, and now my blogging life is complete. I'm a long time LJ user and a growing MT user, and now they're both under the same roof! Well, from a business standpoint I have to applaud Mena and Ben for making such a terrific acquisition. LiveJournal is going to really add value to your portfolio. According to Brad it was going to happen anyway, so those "down with corporate America" folks have been kicked in the nuts once again complete with a "live with it" sign stuck to their back. Bitter? Nah.
On that subject by the way, Mena did make a really good statement that hit home with me and what I think of the whole community:
I believe that LiveJournal has, unfortunately, received a bum rap because many have considered the postings on LiveJournal to be trivial. It's sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say (and I'm generalizing). The fact is, webloggers and LiveJournalers are in essence doing the same thing: they are posting their thoughts to people who are important to them. For some webloggers, it's 100,000 people, for others it is 10. For LiveJournalers, it may be 30 people, it may be 3 (or a combination of some number).
Mena Trott, Six Apart
Amen Mina, amen.
I really hope that the two entities can learn from each other and take advantage of each others' strengths and weaknesses (speaking of which, SWOT-ting Your Website, my next article is coming soon.) and truly become one of the great blogging conglomerates out there. Not only will that do wonders for the company itself, but it will bring together and help mature a community that has been going through many weening stages over the past few years. Hopefully, our community and our way of life can be respected in the future, and in my opinion this is the first step to doing just that.