alicetiara

LiveJournal's present success can be attributed to what sets it apart rather than what it has in common with typical social media sites. Unlike Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, LiveJournal's features encourage a long-term, deep engagement between users that is comparable to a real-life (usually abbreviated as "RL" on LiveJournal) conversation.

While a Twitter message (140 characters) or a Facebook status update (160 characters) is designed to be extremely brief, LiveJournal users frequently write lengthy entries that encourage and solicit substantial comments from friends. These comment threads can include dozens of people and multithreaded conversations on both personal journals and community journals.
LiveJournal also has full integration with a network of friends that encourages more meaningful relationships.

alice_marwick

danahboyd

1. citations of published, peer-reviewed articles that examine LJ;
2. PDFs of not-yet-published articles concerning LJ;
3. a list of scholars who study LJ-related issues (and their affiliation/contact info).

pyrop

This may be slightly off-topic but i feel that it would still be of interest to the users of this community.

First, I would like to examine the voter turnout for the recently finished LJ advisory board elections. 35460 accounts cast votes in the Russian and English polls combined. At this current time, according to stats.bml, there are 1789025 active accounts, 956685 accounts that have been updated in the last 30 days, and 545102 accounts updated in the last 7 days. So out of all active accounts, only 1.98% voted; 3.71% or 6.51% voted out of the accounts updated in the last 30 or 7 days, respectively. I think the 7 days number is most interesting, because those are the users who used LiveJournal during the period when the polls were open. To look at this another way, 93.5% of the accounts that bothered to update didn't bother to vote.

This may look bad, but even voter turnouts for midterm elections in the US never get much higher than 20%. If you think of this election as a fourth as serious as a congressional election, 6% isn't that bad. Several people expressed to me their dismay at the absence of a "None of the above" vote; many people may have not voted because they did not want to vote for any of the available candidates. Voter turnouts for online elections also tend to be low (for reasons nobody totally understands). Also, i get the impression that people's feeling of voter salience was pretty low; they felt that this election would make no difference.

If I knew approximately how many accounts are in Russian, i could find separate voter turnouts for the two languages, but I don't have that information on hand at the moment. Disregard this, the numbers are completely off.

Second, i noticed a possible flaw in how the vote count for the election was executed. It does not change the outcome of this election, but it could in future ones. ( This is sort of nit-picky. )

Third, i want to put a question up for open discussion. Is Instant-Runoff Voting the most appropriate voting system for this election? I, personally, think that Approval voting would be better. What we really want from these elections is the candidate whom the most users approve of, and approval voting gives that as its winner directly if everyone votes honestly. It is also much less convoluted than IRV; certainly, my comments on the execution of the vote count show we had a problem with it this time. There are arguments against IRV based on voting theory as well (as there are against every voting system), but i'm not going to get into that unless someone indicates interest.

pyrop

I am planning on researching the rate of growth in the number of English LJs and the number of Russian LJs. Unfortunately, there's no data on which language LJs are written in; the closest thing is the country of origin. I'll have to make an assumption about the majority language of LJers from that country, and I do realize there are Russians speaking English and Americans speaking Russian and people from Russia and America speaking French, Japanese, Spanish, and Esperanto, but i've got to draw the line somewhere. This isn't the language that LJers speak, it's the language they write their LJs in most of the time.

So here are the top 15 countries on LJ, and the language I think LJers from there most often write in. If i'm doubtful, there will be a question mark. Can anyone with experience in those spheres of LJ help me out?

• United States - English
• Russian Federation - Russian
• Canada - English
• United Kingdom - English
• Australia - English
• Ukraine - Ukranian or Russian?
• Singapore - English or Chinese or Malay?
• Philippines - English or Filipino?
• Germany - German?
• Finland - Finnish?
• Japan - Japanese?
• Netherlands - Dutch?
• Belarus - Belarussian or Russian?
• Israel - Hebrew or Russian or English?
• Brazil - Portugues?

Are there other countries that aren't in the top 15 that are sources of English or Russian LJs? New Zealand, Ireland, and maybe South Africa are missing from the English-speaking side. Russian, in addition to the countries listed, is an official language in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Are there any other countries that Russian or English LJs may come from?

pyrop

LJ Population Stats, Round 2. Go here.

tl;dr: It looks like the activity rate is stabilizing from its decline over the past three years, but it's really too early to be sure.

pyrop

Why didn't anyone tell me about this community earlier?

A few months ago, I made a post in my own LJ about LJ's population, similar to what jofish22 posted here in March of 2006.

I'm now poking at the gender statistics, and they're, um, anomalous. My graph, let me show you it:

Here's a zoom in on the gender stuff. My first question: The hell is that big drop between 2006-01-11 and 2006-01-17? There we lose 1.2 million male, 2.5 million female, and 1.1 million unspecified accounts. There's another crazy thing that's not immediately evident: from 2004-11-28 to 2006-01-11, the sum of male, female, and unspecified accounts is higher than the number of total accounts.

This is the percent difference between the sum of male, female, and unspecified accounts and the total accounts, over total accounts. It makes sense for there to be less accounts with gender data than total accounts, because things like communities don't have gender, and accounts get deleted, etc, but for there to be more fails a sanity check.

My gut feeling is that the parts before that big shoot up in 4th quarter 2004 and after the big drop are valid, and the part between is wonky, and the drop is someone fixing whatever piece of code was making it weird. Nothing changed in stats.pl during this time, and there's nothing applicable in the changelog between 2006-01-11 and 2006-01-17 (if there is, I missed it). I also remember that near the period the drop occurs in, LJ was resolving some security problems, but i don't see how a fix for the cookies would affect gender.

Does anyone know what caused, and relieved, The Great Gender Spike and Drop of 2005? I'm stuck.

alphasarah

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