Sean’s House

At least when it comes to data, that is. Blogging? Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I’m a part of sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, and Lord help me, MySpace, but every time I just come back to rolling my own thing.

I mean, it doesn’t matter what the features are. I like the community aspects of LiveJournal, but it just bugs me that for whatever reason, LJ could decide to hang it up and take everything down, my data with it. Or worse still, they could hand that data over to people I don’t want them to. I run my own websites, I run my own mail server, hell, I even run my own ISP, it’s just what I’ve done, ever since I got on the internet in 1989. I know that rolling my own blog means it’s going to look fairly bland, or it’ll have a theme that 35 million others will have as well. I’m not a web designer. I never will be. Let’s hear it for themes!

There’s got to be a way to make distributed social networks work. I want to control my part of the internet, and link to yours in a meaningful way. Now, there’s stuff like XFN, which allows you to define a relationship with another person by tagging the links you make to their webspace. It kinda works, but I haven’t played with it enough to understand how people can derive relationships. I’ll post more as I learn about it.

So don’t get me wrong, I like these social networking sites, there’s just too many of them and there’s no way everyone will be on the same one. So why bother?

Update: Hey! I found a LiveJournal crossposting plugin for WordPress. It seems to do a pretty good job too.