|
|
|
January 6th, 2009
 | 09:48 am - I did wonder why they were moving the servers away from the engineers...
SUP, the Russian overlords of LiveJournal, laid off 20 of 28 employees with no notice and no severance this morning. [Correction: according to ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) foxfirefey on no_lj_ads, it's more like "13 let go, 17 kept in total, and 12 let go and 12 kept in SF."]
Ignore the fact that the person writing this article has neither an understanding of LJ or any true journalistic sense of inquiry, and look at the details: ( and they're not pretty )
The author of that article evidently did not take the time to talk to any LJ users about lack of service, bad management and extremely poor top-down public relations under SUP. It's true that LJ has been declining in total numbers, and that those of us who have stayed with it for more than five years are the narrow end of the long tail of a statistical distribution.
[ETA: I realize the news article above isn't very good, but it's the only one I've got right now. The only other things showing up on Google News this morning, even with a full search, are an article posted yesterday on how LJ is still blocked in Kazakhstan, and a December 19 C-net article, LJ users still passionate and shrinking.]
synecdochic, who used to work for LJ before the Russians came, provides a brief update on the Dreamwidth journaling project here -- and some reassurance to LJ users: Nothing's going to happen overnight.
In the meantime, if you have a journal on LJ, best start looking for somewhere to jump if it disappears without notice. It may not happen overnight, but I wouldn't doubt that somewhere along this economic downturn the Russian overlords are going to get tired of running a server farm and cut off the electricity. This is your notice: figure out what you're doing now, and start doing it. ( personal comments behind cut )
ETA: I did a search to find LJ Book, which I used to turn my LJ into a downloaded file. I have found two articles on it here and here, but http://www.ljbook.com/ljbook.html is not working for me. However, LJ Archive -- http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive/ -- is working [but only for Windows?]; check it out.
liz_marcs lists other options and links here.
Karma Apple's long list of links to archiving methods AND explanations of how to get them to work is here: http://karma-apple.insanejournal.com/8073.html
|
 | 09:50 am - I did wonder why they moved the servers away from the engineers
SUP, the Russian overlords of LiveJournal, laid off 20 of 28 employees with no notice and no severance this morning. [Correction: according to foxfirefey on no_lj_ads, it's more like "13 let go, 17 kept in total, and 12 let go and 12 kept in SF."]
Ignore the fact that the person writing this article has neither an understanding of LJ or any true journalistic sense of inquiry, and look at the details: ( and they're not pretty )
The author of that article evidently did not take the time to talk to any LJ users about lack of service, bad management and extremely poor top-down public relations under SUP. It's true that LJ has been declining in total numbers, and that those of us who have stayed with it for more than five years are the narrow end of the long tail of a statistical distribution. [And I'm not even going to say what I think of LJ having had a "permanent account sale" last month.]
[ETA: I realize the news article above isn't very good, but it's the only one I've got right now. The only other things showing up on Google News this morning, even with a full search, are an article posted yesterday on how LJ is still blocked in Kazakhstan, and a December 19 C-net article, LJ users still passionate and shrinking.]
synecdochic, who used to work for LJ before the Russians came, provides a brief update on the Dreamwidth journaling project here -- and some reassurance to LJ users: Nothing's going to happen overnight.
In the meantime, if you have a journal on LJ, best start looking for somewhere to jump if it disappears without notice. It may not happen overnight, but I wouldn't doubt that somewhere along this economic downturn the Russian overlords are going to get tired of running a server farm and cut off the electricity. This is your notice: figure out what you're doing now, and start doing it. ( personal comments behind cut )
ETA: I did a search to find LJ Book, which I used to turn my LJ into a downloaded file. I have found two articles on it here and here, but http://www.ljbook.com/ljbook.html is not working for me. However, LJ Archive -- http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive/ -- is still working [but only for Windows?]. Check it out.
liz_marcs lists other options and links here.
Karma Apple's long list of links to archiving methods AND explanations of how to get them to work is here: http://karma-apple.insanejournal.com/8073.html
|
 | 11:44 am
I'm twistedchick here at IJ, and at several other places that I don't keep up with any more (GreatestJournal ::cough::, Vox, Journalfen, Blurty). When Dreamwidth is available, I hope to move there with all possible speed, or as my Latin teacher used to say, magna cum celeritate. (Which did not make me think of celery much after the first few times.)
Yes, it's possible to read everything in Google's newsreader, but I want a friendslist that I can use to follow what is happening with people, with news, and with rss feeds. I'm picky that way. I like the community aspects of a friendspage, and the ability to move conveniently around through chronology rather than tracking down one single feed and then another, and another... argh.
|
| 12:47 pm
Rather than adding more posts, I'm continuing to update on my first post of the day, here. There are more links to ways to back up LJ, as well as commentary. Most of this is reflected (except for comments) at the IJ post today also.
|
 | 07:01 pm - further news coverage of the current LJ situation
These are all that I could find anywhere online, other than the one item from earlier.
Washington Post: LJ lays off SF staff, will operate from Moscow.
Mashable.com: LJ on life support. Linked because of graph.
Adotas: LJ layoffs.
c-net news: LJ deletes 'about a dozen' jobs.
Webpronews.com: LJ makes deep personnel cuts.
Custompc.co.uk: LJ announces mass layoffs. Note: when a company's staff changes so that the director of finance is in charge, this is not generally a good thing.
|
 | 08:26 pm
It took four hours to move my LJ to IJ: 6282 entries. I used LJ Migrate, for which the info is here: http://www.greatestjournal.com/users/alter_writes/53118.html. No comments appear to have made it, and no, I did not move the Free Speech Zone community, which is no longer mine anyway. I realize there are legal/technical/ethical/privacy/whatever issues about the comments, but I'm a little surprised that they weren't moved when LJ Migrate said it moved some 25,000 of them.
Actually, moving the LJ was not that big an issue for me for one reason: most of the entries I wrote were newsblogging, and the ephemeral nature of online news coverage means that many of the links either won't work now or aren't available for free. I'm glad to have the commentary, but anyone wanting to go back to chase the original stories more than a couple of years may have their work cut out for them.
We have more sleet and rain coming through right now, which is a good thing for the water table.
|
|
|