Monthly Archives: January 2005

LJ Buyout

It’s confirmed and official now. Especially interested in this: “Will LiveJournal stay open source? The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source…” Another interesting thing is that on the 6A site they’re calling everything LiveJournal does “weblogging” which I doubt few bloggers or LJers would, but it’s clearly a deliberate wording on their part. Glad this is out the door, interested to see where it goes. Congrats to Om for the scoop, too—the 6A press release reads a lot like his post.

Six Apart and Live Journal

I’m a little late to this, but the word is that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. Congrats to the 6A and LJ teams! Big news, however you cut it. However, the question is: what exactly are they buying? LiveJournal has about 5.6 million accounts, but only about 2.4 million of these are active. That’s still pretty nice though, considering I imagine it’s about 24x what Typepad/Movable Type have now. Is it the technology? That’s already open source so they would have access to that anyway, and it’s Perl (which is 6A’s core competency) so I’m sure they could find they way around. (I wonder what will happen to the Open Source project after the dust has settled though?) That leads me to think it must be the people and engineers at LJ that 6A is after. Is this enough to position them against Microsoft and Google, as many have been suggesting?

98.6% of LiveJournal users don’t pay a thing, but that still gives 6A ~93,000 accounts paying $25/year. That revenue will be nice, especially since 6A has so many employees, but I don’t think it’s the coup most people are expecting. Remember the people who invested $10M in Six Apart are expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar business. It’ll be interesting to hear what the official word is on this, if and when an official word comes out. I’m probably missing something obvious. (And where is Yahoo in all of this? They better hurry up and buy someone too.)

MusicBrainz

I remember reading about MusicBrainz forever ago but I’ve really started using it in earnest today and it’s totally blowing me away. Running a little slow though, this might be the application that gets me to upgrade my computer. Why don’t these guys have every music site and VCs pounding down their door? Fantastic, moderated metadata plus collection management? That’s hot.

First American in 1924

Apparently Robert Cronk was the first American born in 1924 and is very proud of that fact. I got an email from him, presumably because of the genealogy site I admin: “In a cursory examination of your website, I notice, in addition to all the others born on January 1st, there are five specified as being born on January 1, 1924. I would like you to pass along my greetings to these five persons, because I, too, was born on January 1, 1924. I know it is premature, but January 1, 2004, is fast approaching, so I would like to say to everyone who shares that date as a birthday, HAPPY BIRTHDAY and HAPPY NEW YEAR from the FIRST AMERICAN BORN IN 1924.” Browse around the site a bit, it’s certainly one of the less traversed corners of the internet. (Yes, I am just now getting to email from 10/2003. I said I was catching up.)