The Journal Wars

Most people who blog, for free, on the web, and ask their friends to join in, are members of what’s known as a “scene journal” crowd. Scene journals made their debut in 1999 with LiveJournal.com, and since then there have been several rip offs of LiveJournal come through. The most memorable one was GreatestJournal.com, a role playing site that emerged to elite high schoolers who weren’t interested in what you had to say but what you looked like, so they could viciously attack you in their snark communities. Unlike LiveJournal, GreatestJournal unlocked all of the paid features for free. You got thousands of user icons. You could tweak your layout anyway you wanted. In June of 2008, GreatestJournal closed its doors to new accounts and encouraged users to sign up at InsaneJournal.com. When LiveJournal deleted many role playing journals, many users went to InsaneJournal because of the promise that role playing journals were welcome there. However, it seems many of the GreatestJournal crowd merged to Scribbld.net, since the viciousness has started up there.

So now that you have a little background information on scene journals, on to the shocker: Yesterday InsaneJournal.com deleted several journals that hadn’t been logged into for months. Then they purged the accounts. Including several journals that belonged to people who have died. I know the owner says he sent out emails, but by the time I got around to logging into the journal, it had been deleted and purged. Damn. I wonder if there was any information that could have helped me in the court case that I’m currently going through? I sincerely hope not, but we’ll never know.

For the record, I have a journal on LostJournal.com as well as the other places I have mentioned here. For some reason, I can’t get into them as much as I have LiveJournal. I guess it’s because I was there first. In the end, is there really a reason to be upset that InsaneJournal purged an account that no one really wanted? Probably. Since I see some journals that haven’t been used since 2006 are still on their servers. Oh well. c’est la vie

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