Blog Journals

Bloggers seeking blog journals should try LiveJournal, where people from the entire world can share their stories, chat about various topics and simply keep in touch. It is a genuinely free online journal where you can meet new friends through writing and sharing your thoughts.

It has more of a sense of community than an ordinary blog, and there are dozens of user-created communities that share a common interest. Whatever you are mainly interested in, there is sure to be a community full of people that share your interest and would just love to hear from you. If not, then create your own!

Live Journal provides you with a Friends page that allows you to read all your friends’ latest posts right on that one page, and you can use it for feeds from other pages you have found interesting so that all your interesting stuff is kept conveniently on one page. No more clicking around trying to find things. You can add any of over 1,000 popular feeds such as Wired News. You choose which you want and you can put it right there on your Friends Page.

You even get a free Instant Messaging service (LJ Talk) that is integrated with your account, so you don’t have to register for it. It allows to to post to LiveJournal by voice or by text message so you keep your journal updated. Blog journals were never so easy!

How about your YouTube account and Photobucket? You won’t want to forget them, and LiveJournal is not an alternative to these but an enhancement. It integrates with any of these and sharing your photos, videos and widgets suddenly got much easier! The Plus and Paid version also gives you Scrapbook, which lets you store and manage photographs and create ophoto-galleries that you can share with others.

If you use Facebook, you can update the Facebook mini-feed whenever you post to LiveJournal. You can set this up from your ‘Viewing Options’ page. Comtact me for more details.

You also have the option of Plus or Paid versions that give you more features than the standard.

Plus is free, but you have to accept ads on your LiveJournal pages. The Paid option offers a whole load of extras for less than $20 a year. You are best to try the free version first and if you find that these kind of blog journals work for you, then check out the paid extras and decide if it worth it. A list right now would be meaningless until you have used LiveJournal first.

The extras provide a lot more than just more control over the templates, look and feel and mood themes of your pages, but also provide more remote facilities and embedded features. So give it a try out. It is free and is a great deal of fun to use, especially once you have joined one or more of the communities and introduced yourself.

If you have never used blog journals before, check it out here:

LIveJournal