Over the years, I have spoken with many individuals for whom LiveJournal has served as that safety net -- people who did not have a community of like-minded souls in their everyday life but found direction online. This is not to say that the larger blogosphere does not offer this kind of support for some. It truly does. Yet, consistently, LiveJournal supports some of the most at-risk individuals, the most explicit subcultures. The LJ community knows how to support these individuals, and I am in particular awe of LJ's support/abuse team for doing what is needed when things get out of hand.

It is for this reason that my heart started beating rapidly when Six Apart decided to purchase LiveJournal. Although this sale may seem like the merger of two prominent blogging companies, it is not that simple. LiveJournal has a particular kind of culture that has formed very distinct from the broader "blogosphere."

Six Apart consistently provides excellent tools for those who want to be bloggers, but they started by building tools, not by building community. Whether LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick intended to or not, he created a community that exists far beyond his tools.

Even though 2004 has been marked as the Year of the Blog, there is no universal blogging culture nor even a common definition of the term. There are many different cultures within the blogosphere and within LiveJournal -- cultures with different needs, desires, intentions. Yet, at the broadest level, the culture of LiveJournal is distinct from the culture of the blogosphere, even if the actual practice is quite similar: to share that which is most meaningful to you with those who will be interested.

The distinction is often categorized by the terms "amateur journalism" as opposed to "public diarying" -- an unfortunate dichotomy that is awkward and fails to represent most of what bloggers and LJers do. Yet in terms of identification, there is often a split. Most people who use LiveJournal talk about their "LJ," not their "blog."

There is no doubt that Six Apart recognizes and values LiveJournal and the community that is embedded in it. At BlogTalk in Vienna, Austria, Mena Trott (the president of Six Apart) began her speech by stating that "I feel strongly -- and have always -- that personal weblogs are often marginalized because of their presumed triviality." She chastised self-identified bloggers for dismissing practices that appeared different from their own. But Trott also recognized cultural differences, noting that her original conception of bloggers reflected those who valued punditry and sought very large audiences to challenge journalism and politics. But through her work on TypePad -- a blogging service hosted by Six Apart -- she realized that there was an extensive population of bloggers who did not have these goals in mind -- they wanted to post only for their friends and family.

It is the intimacy of friends, family and people-like-me that LiveJournal has fostered. When Six Apart bought LiveJournal, it did not simply purchase a tool -- it bought a culture. LJ challenges a lot of assumptions about blogging, and its users have different needs. They typically value communication and identity development over publishing and reaching mass audiences. The culture is a vast array of intimate groups, many of whom want that intimacy preserved. LiveJournal is not a lowbrow version of blogging; it is a practice with different values and needs, focused far more on social solidarity, cultural work and support than the typical blog. It is heavily female, young and resistant. There is no doubt that Six Apart values this, and it should. But at the same time, the act of purchasing someone's house does require responsibility if you want to do right by the tenants, even when those tenants look nothing like any other tenants you have ever seen.

The freaks, geeks and queers need LiveJournal now more than ever before -- they need the safety net that will help them find grounding. My hope is that Six Apart will learn from LiveJournal and treat LJers with nonpatronizing respect. In essence, the company must first value the social contract and culture that are LiveJournal and then let LiveJournal teach it how to make those better.

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