This remark is spot on:

Holy crap, folks, this is as big as it gets. This is Cingular buys AT&T. This is huge.

I think this will be great for both parties. 6A gets a huge boost in users, LJ gets the feature development that they sorely need. This has the potential to be a big deal.

This sort of exchange (mass of users from LJ, money from 6A) also explains why a company with its own hosted service based on proprietary software would pick up a huge open source-powered community site, especially considering that LJ has a Social Contract which promises to avoid ads… Hmm…

My, I didn’t see this coming.

Update #1: Ahh, this puts it in more perspective… 6A is competing with titans:

So now we have the triumvirate of the Blogging Empire; Six Apart, Blogger and MSN Spaces. Each one of the three come bring different strengths, MSN Spaces has the virtually unlimited resources of Microsoft, Blogger has the cool tech might of Google and Six Apart is something of the underdog given how much smaller it is than the other two. It will be interesting to see how the blogging land grab plays out.

And it’s a better fit than, say, AOL buying Nullsoft. It never seemed like the 6A folks were against open source or something (Although, as a WordPress user, it’s hard to think of Movable Type as an underdog..)

Update #2: This entry is starting to feel too ‘bloggy’, but anyway—Xial now has his own entry which contains whatever else I had to add, excluding for his disdain for 6A. I don’t care for MT the software because it’s such a pain to install and configure to a decent condition (I needed a plugin to escape the ampersands in URLs!), but I respect the 6A and Danga teams and wish them luck.

Update #3: I lied; there is much more to add. Matt analyzes the prospects and can’t figure out a reason for the deal. Also, I’d forgotten about the larger LJ community’s whinyness—there is going to be a torrent of jaw-gnashing complaints. Here’s a pretty mellow piece:

A great disturbance in the Force… like a million whiny teenager’s voices suddenly silenced… wait, wouldn’t that be a good thing???

*lol* Actually I’m concerned. I like my LJ the way it is, imperfect as it is. I like it being able to support itself, have no desire for it to become truly corporate. Grrr.

Matt links to sober comments from someone who’s done work on the LJ backend. Personally, I don’t think the site itself will go through much upheaval, but what do I know.

Update #4: Obligatory Metafilter thread. Reading it did send me back into ‘what the hell?’ mode (Mefi snark: “I can’t wait for the whining about the pricing structure if you have more than one journal”). LiveJournal is a site with lots of drama going on all the time. And if you read between the lines in insomnia_lj’s posts at Mefi, it’s obvious that he’s unhappy… Here’s another post by Christopher Schmidt. I still think that if anything bad happens, his prediction 2 will be what occurs—nothing too problematic.

Finally, via gapingvoid, the best writeup I’ve seen so far: Danah Boyd’s The Cultural Divide Between LiveJournal and Six Apart. Interestingly, Dana has the flipside of the anti-LJ/Xanga elitism:

People who use LJ talk about their LJs, not their blogs. They mock bloggers who want to be pundits, journalists, experts. In essence, they mock the culture of bloggers that use Six Apart’s tools. During interviews with LJ/Xanga folks, i’ve been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard.

In the end, I think the answer to the question I’m left with—”why?”—is the last thing I’d have thought of: they want the LJ coders:

Essentially they need less “prolific bloggers� and more “programmers� on their staff.

I’ll bet that’s the bottom line here. If there’s one thing you can’t deny about the Danga people–especially Brad–it’s that they’re great problem-solvers and restless innovators. Doesn’t hurt that they use the same language for their apps (Perl).

Update #5:

• Slashdot threads: 1, 2.
• Official LJ announcement. I hadn’t even thought of the ‘What does 6A have that LJ could benefit from?’ angle:
  

  [...] Six Apart has a lot of staff that we don’t… marketing, designers, usability people, etc. It’s been frustrating the past few years knowing that in a number of ways LiveJournal is technically the best but because we weren’t the prettiest and didn’t give good quote, we were often overlooked.

  This is too true. Especially when compared to blogger.com, LiveJournal is much more technologically advanced (in terms of features, at least) but was often unfairly ignored.

• Some other interesting posts: 1 (via), 2 (via): “Brad loves LJ, and it is his baby, but the long and short of it is that he was running a business and he’s not a businessman. In fact he hates business- lawyers, accountants, legal issues, managing employees, and all the rest. Christ, he’s only 24 years old.”
• Also, I’d been amused by the thought of what LiveJournal.com would look like with a ‘hit the monkey’ banner ad or two, but via Brad, here is a better example.
• Mena Trott: Current Mood: Optimistic

In any case, the fuddy-duddies in her college’s administration were not amused. And their actions have made her rethink her content:

The message I’m forced to take away from this is that the administration of this college is failing badly. If a freshman student’s blog, hardly better than hearsay, is distressing enough that it’s grounds for taking punitive action, then administrators are truly and sadly clueless about the scope of undergraduate activities at MIT. I am still shocked that anyone would care what I write on a personal website. In any case, I know online journals by students at other college who talk with complete frankness about getting hammered most weeknights, smoking pot, experimenting with other drugs — all kinds of things a college administration would surely jump on if they knew. [...]

So. I’m trying really hard not to be completely pissed off, but this whole business makes me very angry and sad. No, this isn’t censorship, per se. But the MIT Big Brother has definitely paid me a visit.

Add one more to the list of people muzzled by work/academia, family or other concerns.

Last year, Joi Ito wrote about the collapsing facets of identity. Basically we present different facets of our personality to different people. Mom talks to a different ‘me’ than my close friends do; my professors don�t talk to same person that an anonymous IRC correspondent of mine would.

When you write in a mass-published medium, the audience cannot be demarcated. Although that’s obvious, it’s also quite unfortunate. I can think of things I’d write here if it didn’t get to, say, family and the people who know them. Or maybe everyone but that one person who’s the unnamed subject of a post.

Anonymity is a solution. Pseudonymity is indeed what many writers opt for; Atrios, Jivha and Belle immediately come to mind. It might be somewhat workable if all you want to do is rant about being grounded or that person who pissed you off at an odd time yesterday. But the minute you want to connect your anonymous online activity to your identifiable persona, you’re going to bear the responsibility for all you’ve written. Atrios and Belle maintain a shaky kind of anonymity–the former attended the Democratic Unity Dinner and the latter has a book deal. The clincher: misstep an itsy bit and Google will find you. (The creator of ‘ChatNannies’ is–to put it charitably–a potentially unsavoury figure, ‘Amanda Doerty’ is probably someone else, etc.)

So if you can’t write about everything identifiably, and workable anonymity forces an effacement of personality, what’s the way to write and be yourself? Own yourself. Don’t post anything–on weblogs, in comments, on Usenet–that you’re not comfortable with the whole world knowing about. Be anonymous in other situations. Realize that the whole model of the Internet thwarts information control, and use that awareness to your advantage.

But the information consumers also have to play by these rules of the Panopticon. L’s college is trying to preserve a reputation that is fake: “Our students? Drink when underage? Horror of horrors, never!”

Information that stayed within groups of friends in the past or was time-shifted is now broadcast around the world in real time. Deal with it. How many bits can you force into how many mouths? How much expression are people going to curb and how many audiences are they going to shut from those with the drive to express themselves? Like Mark Pilgrim wrote,

Writers will write because they can’t not write. Repeat that over and over to yourself until you get it. Do you know someone like that? Someone who does what they do, not for money or glory or love or God or country, but simply because it’s who they are and you can’t imagine them being any other way?

You do now.

Fuck MIT’s BlogPolice.