It is perplexing why LiveJournal and its ilk are so often ignored or looked down upon in the mainstream blogosphere. Last week Steven at Library Stuff wrote an interesting post about why blogging works, especially for bringing people together who have common interests. On a smaller scale, I can relate to what Steven is saying with this explodedlibrary blog. For me, LiveJournal does a better job of bringing people together with common interests (actually, it was a mutual LJ friend who first introduced me to Steven's blog). I have no idea how many librarians are on LiveJournal. As of today, the libraries LJ community has 924 members and the library grrls community has 724 members. These communities are open to anybody, so some of the members mightn't work in libraries, but presumably they wouldn't have joined if they weren't interested in library issues. My favourite one is a closed and quasi-underground library LJ community which I'm not even going to name or link to here, but if you're curious, look around or ask around and you'll find it. The best thing is about the communities is that if somebody writes a post that you like or found interesting, you can take a look at their personal LiveJournal and get to know people that way.
There are a couple of things that I really like about LJ - being able to filter posts so that only those people that I feel close to can read certain things. The other thing is that because LJ entries generally don't show up on Google and other search engines (and even if they did, basic anonymity is provided by a pseudonym), the entries are less pretentious, and more honest, personal and revealing. They can provide helpful information and support for living as a librarian. And of course, everybody has to work out what works best for them, but sometimes it can be helpful to see what other people go through and how they cope.
