From today I’m going to be handling cross-posting to LiveJournal a little differently.

I came to internet society via LiveJournal. I’d been tuning in to IRC channels for a few years, already — found those in… hell, ‘96 or ‘97? It seemed just right to make a handle and join in the conversation when I could. I was moving around a lot back then, and IRC was the internet equivalent of citizen’s band. And, not surprising, I spent many a sleepless night there, just checking to see if there were any other lonely voices on the waves.

I was sleeping about three hours a day, then. From ten in the morning to one in the afternoon. God I miss being young.

At any rate, in January of ‘02 I had slowed down a bit, and was without a personal website, so when I got an LJ invite from my friend Mao (who has since gone her way, and I hear from in bottled messages from her island a million miles away) I figured, what the hell. LivejJournal was fantastic in ‘02… It was invite-only, and many of us already knew each other from somewhere else. It was a little bit of a Bohemian settlement in the middle of the InterCityNet. I’m getting damned near sentimental… heh. That’s probably the reason why I’ve kept my account for so long. My LJ account is, in its way, my key back into a city I left years ago. It’s the slender line that connects me to wonderful people that I never want to have “left behind” even though I’ve moved out on my own.

Are my internet metaphors drive you nuts, yet? Maybe I should just call things what they are: Social Networks, Blogging Platforms, Friends Locked Entries, Categories, Links, and URLS. But I really think we’ve been focusing on the tech, the APIs, the marketing, and the buzzwords for so. fucking. long. that we’ve started to forget that “Sites” used to be called “Home Pages”, that “Comments” can still be conversation, and that “Users” are real people.

But to LiveJournal, where I still read, I still comment, and in an attempt to touch in and touch base I still crosspost: I think it’s time to stop echoing what’s going on over here, over there. I’m still going to crosspost any entries that link to other people, because I want to send those letters from the wide, wide, world. But I don’t live there anymore, you know? I just go back to visit, sometimes, and you’re all welcome to visit me, too. And I’m likely going to lose a few readers in my quest to figure out how all of this works, for me… but that’s all right. I’m just playing with how this net works.

I’m tired of twenty companies in Silicon Valley giving me their answers.

Isn’t anyone else?