LiveJournal facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Quick facts for kids
LiveJournal

LiveJournal homepage
Type of site	Blog hosting
Available in	33 languages
Owner	Rambler Media Group
Created by	Brad Fitzpatrick
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Optional (required to post)
Launched	April 15, 1999; 26 years ago (1999-04-15)
Current status	Online
Written in	Perl

LiveJournal is a popular online service where people can create their own blogs, like an online diary or journal. It's also a social networking service, meaning you can connect with friends and other users. An American programmer named Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal on April 15, 1999. He originally created it to keep his high school friends updated on what he was doing.

Over the years, LiveJournal changed owners. In 2005, a company called Six Apart bought it. Later, in 2007, a Russian media company named SUP Media bought LiveJournal. Even though it was bought by a Russian company, it kept operating from the U.S. for a while. However, in 2016, LiveJournal moved its computer servers to Russia. In 2017, it updated its rules to follow Russian laws. Many public figures and people who share their opinions, especially in Russia, use LiveJournal to write about different topics.

What LiveJournal Offers

LiveJournal has many features that make it a fun place to share your thoughts and connect with others.

Connecting with Friends

One of the most important parts of LiveJournal is the "friends list." This is how users connect with each other. You can add someone to your friends list, and they can add you back. When you "friend" someone, it means you're connected to them on the site.

Your friends list often includes not just individual people but also groups (called "communities") and even news feeds. When you add someone to your friends list, you can often see their private posts, and their new posts will show up on your "friends page." You can also organize your friends into "friends groups" for more control over who sees what.

Journal Entries and Comments

Every time you write something on LiveJournal, it's called a "journal entry," and it gets its own web page. Other users can leave comments on your entries, creating a discussion. You also have a main journal page that shows all your most recent entries.

Personalizing Your Account

LiveJournal lets you make your account unique. You can change how your journal looks using a special programming language. You can also upload small pictures called "avatars" or "userpics." These pictures show up next to your username, like on an online forum. If you have a paid account, you get even more ways to customize your page and more userpics.

Every user also has a "User Info" page. This page shares details like contact information, a short bio, and lists of your friends, interests, and communities you belong to.

Account Types

LiveJournal has different types of accounts:

Basic accounts: Most users have this free account. It shows some ads to people who aren't logged in.
Paid accounts: These accounts offer extra features and usually don't show ads.
Permanent accounts: These are special accounts that are rarely available.

LiveJournal also allows you to embed videos from other websites or upload your own videos to include in your posts.

Cool Features for Paid Accounts

If you have a paid account, you get extra perks:

To-do list: You can create lists to manage your goals and tasks, with details like priority and due dates.
Express Lane: Your pages might load faster during busy times because your requests get priority.
Voice Post: You can call a special number from your phone, record a message, and upload it directly to your journal.
Extra storage: You get more space to store photos and voice posts, making it easier to add them to your entries.

LiveJournal Community Life

LiveJournal is a big online community where people share ideas and connect.

Talking with Others

Just like on most blogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries. These comments can turn into a conversation, like a message board. You can reply to specific comments, starting new discussions. Users can also control who can comment on their posts. For example, you can choose to only allow comments from your friends, or you can block comments from people who aren't logged in. You can even choose to review comments before they appear or turn off comments completely.

LiveJournal also hosts group journals called "communities." Anyone who joins a community can post messages there, just like on their own journal. Communities also have "maintainers" who manage the group and its members.

Community Roles

In LiveJournal communities, different users have different roles:

Owners: These are the main supervisors of a community and have all the administrative powers.
Maintainers: They help supervise the community, control its settings, and perform some administrative tasks.
Moderators: They can approve or reject messages, add labels to posts, approve new members, and hide or freeze comments.
Members: They can see posts that are only for community members.
Watchers: They can set permissions, allow people into the community, delete posts, or hide comments.

People Who Help Out

In the past, many LiveJournal users volunteered their time to help with things like customer support and translating the website into different languages. They even helped develop the software! However, as the company grew and hired more paid employees, there became less need for volunteers in software development.

Who Uses LiveJournal?

As of 2012, there were almost 40 million accounts on LiveJournal, with nearly 2 million active users. Most users who shared their age were between 17 and 25. Slightly more women (55%) used the platform than men (45%).

LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries, especially the United States. However, it's also very popular in Russia. In fact, LiveJournal is one of the biggest online communities in Russia, with a large percentage of all Russian blogs being on LiveJournal.

Frank the Goat: The Mascot

LiveJournal has a fun mascot named Frank the Goat! In the early days of the site, many users treated Frank like a real animal. He even had his own short "biography" and "journal." Sometimes, if you called LiveJournal's Voice Post service, you might hear a message saying, "Frank the Goat appreciates your call."

For a while, there was even a weekly comic strip about Frank, drawn by cartoonist Ryan Estrada, which was very popular among LiveJournal users.

Keeping Your Information Private

LiveJournal offers options to help you control who sees your posts and information.

Controlling Who Sees Your Posts

You can choose to make your journal entries "friends only." This means only people on your friends list can read them, keeping your posts hidden from the general public. This feature was later adopted by other social media sites. You can also create special groups within your friends list to share posts with only certain people.

LiveJournal also has a "private" option, which means only you can read the post. This turns your LiveJournal into a personal, secret diary. You can even set a default privacy setting so all your posts are private or friends-only unless you change it.

Controlling Comments

You can also decide who can comment on your posts. You can allow anyone who can read your post to comment, or you can restrict comments. You can even "screen" comments, meaning you see them first and approve them before they appear publicly. These controls can be applied to anonymous users, people not on your friends list, or everyone.

Hiding Your Connections

LiveJournal lets you hide your "friend of" list (who has friended you) from public view. You can also hide the communities you belong to from your profile page. For users with paid accounts, it's easy to change the privacy settings for many past entries at once.

Communities themselves can also be private. They might have rules about who can join or different levels of access to content, depending on the user.

Famous LiveJournal Communities

One of the most famous communities on LiveJournal is called Oh No They Didn't, or ONTD. It's super popular, with over 100,000 members! This community focuses on celebrity gossip, sharing news and stories from other gossip blogs. It became so big that LiveJournal had to move it to its own special computer system to keep the site running smoothly for everyone.

LiveJournal's Story

How It Started and Changed Hands

LiveJournal was created by Brad Fitzpatrick, who owned the company called Danga Interactive. In 2005, he sold his company to Six Apart. Brad Fitzpatrick later left to work for Google in 2007, but he continued to advise LiveJournal for a few years.

Becoming a Russian Company

LiveJournal became incredibly popular in Russia. The Russian name for LiveJournal, "ZheZhe," even became a common word for blogging in Russia!

In 2006, Six Apart allowed a Russian company called SUP Media to use the LiveJournal brand in Russia. Later, in December 2007, SUP Media bought LiveJournal completely. Even though the company said it would keep most of its operations in the U.S., by 2009, some of the development work moved to Russia. In December 2016, LiveJournal's servers (the computers that store all the website's information) were moved to Russia. Then, in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its rules to follow Russian laws.

Rules and Changes

Being Blocked in Some Countries

Sometimes, governments can block websites. In May 2007, the Chinese government blocked LiveJournal. Later, in October 2010, LiveJournal was blocked in Kazakhstan by a court order because some blogs had content that was considered extreme. In March 2012, Uzbekistan also started blocking LiveJournal, making it hard for people there to access certain blogs.

New Rules in Russia

On April 4, 2017, LiveJournal made big changes to its rules, stating that the service would now follow Russian law. These new rules said that users couldn't post "advertising and/or political materials" or do anything that went against Russian laws. The rules also mentioned that blogs with more than 3,000 daily visitors would be treated like news outlets, meaning they couldn't be anonymous and would be responsible for what they published.

These new rules caused many users to worry about what they could and couldn't say. Some people felt that their ability to express themselves freely might be limited. Because of these changes, many users decided to move to other online platforms where they felt they could share their thoughts more openly.

Images for kids

Brad Fitzpatrick, who created LiveJournal.