the o.c.

there is most certainly a correlation between original content production rates/levels and the kind of publishing software one uses.  although, this could be a completely different axis of time vs. ease-of-use but that, i feel, is obvious.

maybe this is a longer piece for newsvine but ideally, it’d have to be more scientific.

out of the 3 major CMS or blogging software eras, i look back on livejournal as having the highest concentration of original content across the community.  wordpress is/can be very long-form and structured but a lot goes into keeping a high level of original content on such a platform.  so much so that an entire industry has blossomed from it.  tumblr has a lot of good things going for it.  not only is it platform du jour but it seems to combine a healthy balance of everything.  their biggest strength being the correlation between design & content.  something that, if you were/are on livejournal/wp, you have to have a higher level of understanding to create fluid experiences.  design-out-of-the-box, if you will.

tumblr also hinges on larger data trends that exist now that didn’t when livejournal was peaking.  aggregation, being the most prominent.  we’re spread out.  everything is spread out.  we’re plugged into large amounts of communication channels.  this wasn’t around at the turn of the century (2000-2001).  if you were creating content, it was focused.  lj posts existed within a tight, yet burgeoning, community.  if you wanted content in a post, you bought your own host or waded through the myriad of free hosting solutions.  this was the point in time where i bought a domain (about-blank.net) in reference to IE’s infamous 404 page and hosted people around the globe who were seeking a trendy e-mail address and a few MBs for some lack-luster photoshop brushes.

how did we break out?  smart people created smart solutions that specialized in handling our content better than before.  things like flickr and twitter.  opening up our content pulled us out of our tribal communes (re:  member-only lj groups) and quickly towards platforms that could better manage, aggregate and re-distribute.