Six Apart to buy Live Journal? Wow. A lot of people are saying this isn't true, so I wouldn't count it as a done deal just yet. Six Apart is the company behind Movable Type blogging software and the TypePad blog hosting service. Live Journal is a *huge* blog community with 5,655,452 users (2,443,264 of whom actively post.) This would create a very large blog entity which could, as Om points out in the first link above, have "a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces."
Still, for all the wow factor of a big merger like this, I'm not sure what difference it will make to anyone. For instance, it is not at all clear that blog hosting is ever going to make anyone any money. And technorati already mines all the data, so having your own big stable of blogs doesn't get you any secret use data that might have value. Sort of seems like a big headache to me. MIght be a classic dot com era business play:
1. Get a lot of users
2. ???
3. Profit!
LIve Journal confirms it's true. I thought the most interesting part of the LJ explanation was: "We have experience with making 'inward-facing' community sites, whereas their sites/products tend to be 'outward-facing'. They want some of that inward-facing action." This makes a lot of sense to me. Live Journal is much more of a community than most blog hosts because of the way you can make connections between the pages. LJ is totally open (source), but it kind of locks you in in the sense that if all your friends are on LJ then you want to be too because of the deep interaction between pages. Obviously, from a business perspective, this would be a good thing for Movable Type to learn from. Will be interesting to watch it develop.
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A lot of people are saying this isn't true, so I wouldn't count it as a done deal just yet. Six Apart is the company behind Movable Type blogging software and the TypePad blog hosting service. Live Journal is a *huge* blog community with 5,655,452 users (2,443,264 of whom actively post.) This would create a very large blog entity which could, as Om points out in the first link above, have "a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces."Still, for all the wow factor of a big merger like this, I'm not sure what difference it will make to anyone. For instance, it is not at all clear that blog hosting is ever going to make anyone any money. And technorati already mines all the data, so having your own big stable of blogs doesn't get you any secret use data that might have value. Sort of seems like a big headache to me. MIght be a classic dot com era business play:
1. Get a lot of users
2. ???
3. Profit!
- jim 1-05-2005 9:37 pm
LIve Journal confirms it's true. I thought the most interesting part of the LJ explanation was: "We have experience with making 'inward-facing' community sites, whereas their sites/products tend to be 'outward-facing'. They want some of that inward-facing action." This makes a lot of sense to me. Live Journal is much more of a community than most blog hosts because of the way you can make connections between the pages. LJ is totally open (source), but it kind of locks you in in the sense that if all your friends are on LJ then you want to be too because of the deep interaction between pages. Obviously, from a business perspective, this would be a good thing for Movable Type to learn from. Will be interesting to watch it develop.
- jim 1-06-2005 7:02 pm