In Soviet Russia, LiveJournal Blogs on You!
First off, apologies for this post’s title. It had to be done, though. On Monday, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company. When I first read about it, one eyebrow raised slightly, but I didn’t think much of it. Then I started noticing comments coming in from my friends and colleagues talking about how they felt about it.
A former coworker of mine, icon, who was born in Russia, expressed his concern about the purchase. He casts doubts on Russia’s privacy laws and a Russian company’s concern in adhering to what laws there are. I was expecting him to speak up on this issue, and am glad to have his input. Luis Villa also throws in his thoughts, as well as the thoughts of a former coworker of his. Luis knows his way around law, free speech, and free software, so I was also looking forward to hearing what he thought.
My take on it is that we can’t be certain to trust LiveJournal with our private information any longer, nor can we safely consider them reputable librarians of our thoughts and ideas that we’re sharing with the world through blogs. I have a handful of friends who are deep into LJ, but I think if there’s a good time to move your stuff off to another site, it’s now. Six Apart — the company who previously owned LiveJournal — also owns both Vox and TypePad, which provide similar user experiences to LJ but are still held by an American company. There’s also Google’s very popular Blogger, which is where Icon’s moved to, and I think Google’s as trustworthy as any other company at the moment. I personally run the open-source WordPress software hosted on a server that I share, but I understand that’s beyond many people’s technical skills, for whom I recommend WordPress.com, run by the company under whose stewardship the similarly named software currently rests.
All of those options are, so far as I’m aware, either entirely free (as in $0) or free for a certain basic level of service. If you know otherwise, or if you have any other ideas, please leave comments. Your personal data, as well as your thoughts, are too important to leave in the hands of someone you can’t trust.
Luis wrote,
US privacy laws aren’t substantially better than Russia’s. If you want security, self-host or host in Europe.
Link | December 5th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
fdiv_bug wrote,
Fair enough; I was mostly basing my Russia comment on what icon said. Do you have any recommendations for European blog hosts to which I could direct my LJ friends? Also, heya Luis!
Link | December 5th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
etselec wrote,
Well, I don’t particularly like LiveJournal and wish that I had chosen to host my blog somewhere else, and am not terribly happy with the current take-over. But the effort to move my blog seems Herculean. I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. Maybe it would be if I made the move to self-host.
Link | December 6th, 2007 at 11:28 am
fdiv_bug wrote,
As Luis mentions, self-hosting is the right way to go if it’s within your technical skills and you already have or can afford getting a web host. WordPress is pretty easy to setup and maintain, and you never have to worry about your data getting locked in to anything. There’s a blog post that someone wrote about getting your data out of LJ and into your hands, where it can be massaged as necessary to import into any other tool, I’d imagine. The ljArchive tool he mentions is Windows-only, although since it’s written using .NET it might work with Mono on Linux.
Link | December 6th, 2007 at 11:49 am