An LJ feature I'd like

[nancylebov]

Mark all comments added after time/date--it's the only way I can think of to keep up with long discussions.

Comments

[nosebeepbear.livejournal.com]

Yes. I'd also like to be able to look up all comments by a particular person (limited by posts that are visible to me, of course). Apparently this used to exist, but for some reason LJ decided it was somehow an invasion of privacy. *shrugs*

I'd also like to be able to export comments along with the posts, and be able to choose a range greater than one month when I do that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I asked them about looking up all the comments by an ljer (ljista?), and they said that they couldn't get it to work properly, and weren't likely to be taking another crack at it any time soon.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I think that I would like to have an easy way to follow discussions that end up with sections in multiple journals.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting idea, but I can't imagine how it could be structured. Do you have any ideas?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Second thought: a "show all follow-ups to" would be a start. It would have the classic newsgroup problem of topic drift, though.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I find that if I think of LJ as a very inferior usenet, it annoys the heck out of me. You can't have threads and ongoing conversations in the same way. It occasionally does it for a moment, then it drops the ball again.

If I try to appreciate it as what it is, I get on better with it.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Hi--thanks for coming by.

I suppose I'm trying to figure out if there's any way to combine at least some of the virtues of blogs and usenet. If anything plausible can be worked out, I suppose the next step is to nag the folks who run lj.

Part of the problem may be that they really have incompatible virtues--a blog can give you the sense of having more personal space, but that means that it isn't public space the way a newsgroup is. On the other hand, there ought to be some better way to handle comments on blogs. Crossbreed blogs with trn?

Or maybe (since I haven't yet indentified the gripping hand) the solution is to have a little newsgroup for each person. Aren't some of the sf sites set up that way for authors? On yet another hand, I bet it's really hard to get conversation up to a critical mass.

[snippy]

Oooh, a usenet feed of my LJ. That would be cool.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Right. Communities I think conceptually, and the mass is an issue.

I haven't seen this particular issue addressed yet; but, what I have seen done is certain LJers functioning as (I don't have the right term here) collectors of interesting links? and do this by say at weekend listing out the journals where the discussions are occurring. Still doesn't fit the purpose of drawing those all together but rather pointing out where the different conversations are happening.

It's an interesting question. TBH, blogging in general is an interesting phenomenom.

A number of people I know migrated from a Voy discussion group about a year ago, to get more personal space both I think for controversial posting, and also for posting that was OT to the purpose of the original group. This is how I ended up here, and originally at least my journal was just a port in LJ from which I was visiting friends, it then morphed to a sort of dumping group for the pieces that fit neither the discussion group or my IRL writings and interactions. It also functioned as a bit of an online springboard as new people found the journal, and interest searchs on LJ yielded new people to talk to (or as often is the case through time constraints, read.)

Speaking of which, I should be getting back to work.