l.m. orchard asks “Why does everyone seem to ignore LiveJournal”? I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is that, as said, most of it is pretty lite on actual content. Try clicking on the random journal a few times. The chances of finding something with a lot of content are pretty slim. Heck even my LiveJournal is just me posting about what I ate when I feel like it.

I mostly use LiveJournal to keep up with the friends of mine who use it. I’ve added a number of other random people just because I find reading their posts to be interesting. But the content in LJ seems to be different then your usual blog. It tends to be treated much more as a diary or a place to post your quiz answers. And anytime I’ve looked at any of their user groups I’ve been very disappointed by the lack of any real discussion.

LiveJournal does have some cool features though. The whole concept of friends over there is quite useful. It is kind of like its own built in RSS. But it also provides a level of security in that you can have posts that only your friends can read. Within the LiveJournal community as a whole there are many groupings of friends who use it.

My big issue with LiveJournal is that it seems to live in a vacuum. People there don’t seem to explore off of LiveJournal that often. There’s not any easy way to add a kind of blogrolling list to your journal (at least one that includes people not on LJ). Even their RSS support is pretty lacking IMHO (that could be a whole other rant on its own :)). So while people outside of LJ don’t necessarily watch things there often, I don’t think LiveJournal makes any great efforts to make itself accessable to the rest of the world. Heck, there are a number of people I’ve met from LJ who have never even heard the world ‘blog’.

Konrad Lorenz. “It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.” [Quotes of the Day]

From over on a mailing list I’m on there was a link to this page of product reviews for the Harry Potter Nimbis 2000 Broom over on Amazon. Presented without much comment. But I found it quite funny, especially when you take all the reviews in context of one another.

Thanks to Pasiphae for sending me this link to a wonderful waterpik review over on Epinions.

Following in the footsteps of Smokey and Woodsy, the FTC gives us Dewie. He’s “a savvy little turtle named “Dewie”� with a hardened shell that won’t get crushed on the Information Superhighway.”

Dewie’s mission will be teaching kids to take precautions when they are on the computer, traveling the Internet’s many avenues to information.

“The idea is to get (kids) thinking about it. just like we get them to look both ways before crossing the street” Swindle said.

Once again, Boing Boing provides much entertainment:

Anti-comet airbag plans. A scientist in Oklahoma is planning to build giant, anti-comet airbags that can be sent into space and inflated to deflect the course of world-threating lumps of celestial rock.

Far better to send up a space ship equipped with a massive airbag that could be inflated to several miles wide and used to gently buffet the invading solar body away from a collision course with earth.

“It seems a safe, simple and realistic idea,” Burchard told the magazine’s latest edition.

I can just see the space shuttle with a giant ballon in front of it ramming a comet.

Another NYTimes story. This one about a Means Found to Prosecute Decades-Old Abuse Cases. It features a comments from one priest that left me a bit speachless.

In an interview with The Detroit News that the newspaper published yesterday, Mr. Burkholder said his relationships with boys were “always a two-way thing.”

“The boys work in the rectory with the priest and you just get friendly. You sit down in the rectory and have a Coke. It’s a mutual deal,” he said. “An affectionate thing and a friendly thing.” He said he mostly fondled the boys, but sometimes had oral sex with them.

“It’s a friendship between two people that has been made into something horrible, rotten. People are trying by hook or by crook to make me look bad. Some of the accusations are true, but so what? I was a priest, a good priest, who had a weakness.”

Oh yes, that’s always what I think about when sitting down and having a Coke. What planet is this guy from?

Testing out monthly archives to see if it posts to it automagicly

From the NYTimes:

The Even-More-Compact Disc. The new disc by DataPlay — which is the size of a poker chip but holds 11 hours of music — offers yet another way to play tunes on a palm-sized device. By Michel Marriott. [New York Times: Technology]

Interesting, but 11 hours of music? How much compression are they using on it? That seems like a huge amount of music for something that size. I also really wonder how easy it will be to knock CDs from where they are. CDs were sold offered acoustic value over vinyl. CDs also promised to be recordable. And currently CD players are everywhere. I have nine devices in my home that I can play them on.

Of course, DVD has displayed VHS in an amazingly short amount of time also. Though once again, it was a format that offered better video quality and improved sound.

There’s no such thing as just ‘one quick game’ of Bejeweled.