Just in case

[koganbot]

FYI in case lj shuts down:

my email is edcasual at earthlink dot net

Perhaps we should have a thread on poptimists about contingency plans if lj actually does go down.

For those not following the story, livejournal laid off a whole hunk of its San Francisco staff, 13 of 30 people says one news site, 20 of 28 says another. Its own not-very-informative statement (at least according to this site) goes:

LiveJournal Inc. today announced a restructuring of their US and Russian operations to more effectively manage costs in light of the global economic downturn. LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration and the customer service teams will remain in the United States. LiveJournal's global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the US and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal.

As a result of these changes Matthew Berardo, VP and General Manager of LiveJournal Inc., will be leaving the company along with other valued colleagues. Mr Berardo has played the leading role in consolidating product and design effort to enable the business to more effectively streamline costs during his tenure. LiveJournal Inc. will now be led jointly by Stephanie Gravelle, currently LiveJournal Inc.'s director of finance and administration and Sergei Komarov, currently CTO of SUP (the owners of LiveJournal).

I'm curious if anyone knows what LiveJournal's business model was at the start, and what it is now - as in, how they make their money.

Someone spammed a comment thread with good words about this journal sharing site [EDIT: Insane Journal]. But again, can such a site really get a consistent source of income?

By the way, all along I've been downloading most of the journal entries/comment threads where I've made a comment.

Comments

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it would do someone else's... I think it wants you to have the password for the journal in question.

And yeah, it seems to have downloaded my comments in their entireity. I'm not sure if it allows searching or editing or anything, I imagine you can delete parts of the archive. It displays it, somewhat frustratingly, an entry at a time and you have to flick through them although there's probably some way around this.

As an emergency tool for a quick complete archive, it works fine.

[koganbot]

OK, it's giving me five choices of what to download depending on my "architecture." Four of them say "Platform independent" and one says "any." Which should I choose? What are they talking about?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I don't think it matters; I went for the one which ended in .exe on the basis it seemed simplest.

[koganbot]

OK, here goes! Or not. (I can't tell if it's downloading, since it sent me to this big ad page.)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I had to click the 'if your download's not working click here' thing but so long as you've said to save the .exe somewhere it should be happening. It took very little time for me but I don't know what your connection's like.

[koganbot]

It just wouldn't download at all, and then finally I clicked the "if your download's not working" button for the fifteenth time and it downloaded in a second.

I actually think the format is better there than what I've got here. Unfortunately it doesn't import icons or YouTube imbeds, but it does import photos.

What do they mean by "sync"?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

i'm not really sure, honestly; i assume it means you can 're-sync' archives & update them as you go along possibly?

[koganbot]

By "re-sync" do you mean it will import new comments (such as this one) to an entry it's already archived? (It seems to do this automatically, when I leave the archive and return to it. I'll do that right now a an experiment, to see if it catches this comment.)

[koganbot]

Or maybe it's the equivalent of hitting "refresh."