Dreamwidth Meta

Found this on teh intartoobs, and I'm curious...

2011-02-01T20:46:22Z

Growing and maintaining an open-source community Is there anything mentioned there that Dreamwidth doesn't do, and that might help? He doesn't mention misogyny by name, but a number of his points include it implicitly.What do you make of that approach? (also, can someone remove the "interview" tag? It's't fix it) a misclick, and I can

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Access/subscribe and internet culture collisions

2010-09-17T16:34:37Z

DW culture question on friending -- people discussing how the access/subscribe split affects how they interact with others, as opposed to LJ's friending, in lj_refugees

A Tale of Two Internets, by nikkiscarlet, talks about the difficulties when internet cultures that developed by different mores (anonymous or not) collide.

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How to be a filthy seditious Dreamwidth supporter

2010-03-21T12:46:11Z

So, maybe you are into Dreamwidth, or maybe you want to be more into Dreamwidth but are having troubles making that happen, or maybe you know somebody who wants to be into Dreamwidth but doesn't know how to get that ball rolling. Being "into" Dreamwidth, in this instance, is defined as having a vested interest in helping Dreamwidth grow and thrive, especially in a way that personally benefits you.

This article is going to give you suggestions on how to be a filthy seditious Dreamwidth supporter (as opposed to just a Dreamwidth user or nonuser, which is a perfectly fine thing to be too!)--and they're just that, suggestions. If you have a reason to not use one, don't use it--it's just a general practice guide! (It uses a lot of points from 101 Ways to Help Dreamwidth Grow, if you are curious.) It assumes that you use Dreamwidth and enjoy it, or are strongly interested in using Dreamwidth. And while volunteering is great, this article isn't about supporting Dreamwidth that way, either. So, with that in mind, let us continue!

( This way to the agenda )

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Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity -- Danah Boyd essay

2010-03-18T21:34:41Z

Danah Boyd has put up an essay from a presentation at SXSW called Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity, which feels relevant to me about Dreamwidth and its functions for users.

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Allowing OpenID accounts to post to existing communities

2009-11-09T09:59:28Z

So, currently mark is working on a project to import communities so we can migrate scans_daily, and part of that means making it so that OpenID users can edit and delete posts in communities, but not post to them. But what if OpenID accounts with verified emails were allowed to post to communities?

( More discussion )

So, what do you think the effects of letting OpenID communities post to DW would be? Positive? Negative? Underutilized?

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Interview with Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci

2009-09-16T00:29:48Z

zvi LikesTV. 2009. Interview with Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci. Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 3. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0166.

It can be read here.

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Ways to help Dreamwidth that don't involve volunteering

2009-08-14T00:30:04Z

So, today I decided to make a wiki page called 101 Ways to Help Dreamwidth Grow. It's a list of things people can do to help Dreamwidth grow and thrive that don't involve volunteering--most of them don't involve paying Dreamwidth money, either. Does anybody have things to add to this list?

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Essay link: How Dreamwidth is helping save LiveJournal

2009-08-01T18:45:24Z

azurelunatic has written an LJ/DW meta essay titled How Dreamwidth is helping save LiveJournal.

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Interconnectedness of Dreamwidth users

2009-05-21T21:59:44Z

(I don't know how to collect data on this, but I'm sure it can be done. I'm also not sure what metrics to use, but eh.)

I would like to see data on how interconnected Dreamwidth users are (by subscription, access, or both), especially if it could be compared to LiveJournal. I expect that Dreamwidth is more tightly interconnected than LJ, for a number of different reasons:

1. All free accounts were created by invites, and probably a large number of the now-paid accounts were too.
2. The separation of Access and Subscription has made me a lot more ready to subscribe to others, and I'm not the only one.
3. This place is very fannish. A lot of fandom came over en masse; I don't know that any other communities did, therefore there are probably not many large-yet-separate groups on the site.

Any ideas on how to collect this information? Any thoughts on the worth of the exercise?

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Open Beta hits!

2009-05-07T20:49:08Z

Dreamwidth has been in open beta for about a week now! This post is for discussing any aspects of open beta you'd like to note: what was your experience?

( Some technical and other details )

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Open Beta speculations!

2009-04-29T23:34:46Z

Open Beta is...dundundun...tomorrow!

Here is your post to speculate on what's going to happen. Do you think seed accounts are going to sell fast or slow? What kind of drama is going to erupt when the flood gates are open? Are you expecting to drag people over now that the gates are open more, or are people you know banging to get in?

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On Killfiles

2009-04-23T07:06:15Z

Some time in the future, Dreamwidth is planning to offer a killfile. The specs say that two levels of killfile are planned. The first will collapse posts and comments by the user who has been killfiled. The second will remove all traces of the killfiled user from your view (with the exception of access lists on profiles, and comm membership lists).

View Poll: #120

To borrow foxfirefey's question, what effects do you think killfiles (if put into practice as described above) would have on Dreamwidth and the way people use it?

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Dreamwidth feature polls

2009-04-21T02:16:57Z

The following polls are all about changes in technical features from LJ to Dreamwidth, divided by those available at open beta and those planned for later. If you don't have a Dreamwidth account feel free to sign in with a validated OpenID account and vote!

Because features carry pros and cons and not everyone likes them, each poll question rates them on a sliding scale: -5 means you absolutely detest the feature, -1 means you kind of dislike it, +1 means you kind of like it, zero means you're neutral, and +5 means you absolutely love it. (And, of course, there are in between options too.) If you don't know about a specific feature enough to vote on it, feel free to ask. Remember, you can change your mind on questions--edit your open beta feature answers or edit your planned feature answers!

Spread this around all you like! You can vote in it no matter what you feel about Dreamwidth.

( Dreamwidth Open Beta Features )

( Dreamwidth Planned Features )

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Google Analytics

2009-04-20T20:53:14Z

LiveJournal has never allowed any real web analytics to be added to personal journals, although sponsored communities were able to get them. Sure, you could add stat counters or web bugs from LJ Toys. But I'm unaware of any way on LiveJournal to get the referral URL of people who were linking to your post, save for the recently implemented and entirely optional pingbacks.

Dreamwidth, however, is going to give paid users Google Analytics as a feature. This means that paid users will be able to know who in DW is linking to them, leading to some interesting changes from the way things used to be. I think this has the potential to surprise and upset people.

For instance, let's say you link to someone's post in a friends only post in your journal or use <user name="user"> to link to their journal in a locked post. Some of your access given subscribers click on that link, and if the user you linked to is paid and using Google Analytics, they'll know you were talking about them in a post they don't have access to, and if you linked to a specific post, they'll know which post you're talking about. Stealth talking about people has become that much harder and unreliable.

There's a limited ability to avoid this. URLs are automatically turned into links; you can do formatting to make it unlinked, so people have to copy and paste, but some people have browser extensions that will autolink anything that looks close to a URL, so you can't always depend on that. You'll have to go above and beyond to obfuscate the link to make sure that doesn't happen and not use user tags to link to someone--but if you don't do that, someone is bound to make a Greasemonkey script that could go to a highlighted name, and they'll still get the referral. Edit: charmian and kaki point out that URL obfuscators might get used more, like TinyURL and anonym.to. I agree with this! However, there are even browse add ons that resolve those services to their actual URLs, so even that is not a failsafe.

What effects do you think this is going to have on social interactions on Dreamwidth? What other effects will Google Analytics have on users?

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