Three weeks?

[liv]

I haven't seen any signs of people doing the three_weeks_for_dw thing this year. If we were doing it, I think it would start today, cos it's usually the end of April and beginning of May, around the anniversary of open beta. So let's say hypothetically 22^nd April – 12^th May.

It's no longer really the case that DW is limited because people here aren't actively enough posting content; people who want to be here are here, other people aren't, and lots of people have drifted away from this type of journalling / community-based long-form blogging altogether and probably there's nothing DW can do to get them back. There are still basically no active communities here other than RP communities, but personal journals seem to be pretty solid, I have plenty to read, I'm meeting new interesting people and most of my posts get lively comment discussions.

This time last year, I posted about community building. Although I didn't do a formal Three Weeks thing, because I was a month from my wedding at that point, I have for the whole of the year tried to follow siderea's advice and make more frequent "pointer" posts with links to other content. I haven't managed three link posts a week, nothing like, but I have definitely noticed that pointer posts do encourage discussion, and they do encourage me to post fairly regularly even when I feel like I don't have time to make a full, polished post. I was remarking to a friend recently that I love the curate / propagate internet less than I loved the original content internet that dominated a few years ago, but if that's the milieu we're living in, it certainly does seem sensible to participate in curating and propagating to the best of my ability.

Anyway, I don't want to commit to post every day during the Three Weeks, especially not if I'm the only person who has noticed the season, that really wouldn't make for much of a meme! But I would like to increase my posting rate a bit if I can, because I think that's good in general, and the season is just an excuse. In order to achieve this, I need to resolve to be less perfectionist, so I want to make some off-the-cuff posts, not waiting until I have a honed argument with lots of detailed citations (and ending up never posting half the things that come into my head).

What I'd most appreciate would be some suggestions of topics. Please comment with titles, questions, prompts, or just general topic areas about which you'd like a few paragraphs of my random opinions. And feel free to join in with any degree of challenge to post a bit more during the coming three weeks, you're very welcome to borrow my idea or not if some other motivation for posting more suits you better.

Post queue

1. The Books of Maccabees
2. Why has everyone gone to Facebook?
   2a... or Tumblr
3. My research and supervising a PhD student
4. Anglo-Jewry, politics, the Board of Deputies
5. Baking experiments

Comments

[wychwood]

After a discussion I had this morning - could you talk about the Books of Maccabees? Like, are they part of Jewish scripture? What do they mean to you? I read something about them being marginalised as part of a political agenda, but Hannukah has obviously survived - what's up with that? :) Basically, any thoughts you might have on this subject.

[liv]

Nice prompt, thank you. That may not be the best topic to write about off the top of my head without referring to sources and scholarship, but I can certainly have a go. Plus I think it would be productive to try to explain that the question are they part of Jewish scripture doesn't work the same way as with Christian scripture.

[wychwood]

Yeah, I actually worded that really badly, too! I think I really meant something more like "what do the Books of Maccabees mean in a Jewish context", how do they work, etc. Partly because I was explaining to someone else about the Torah and the prophecy books and the Talmud, etc, and was trying to work out myself how Maccabees would fit.

I didn't mean it to be too researchy - I'd like to know how it looks from your perspective, as it were, because formal research is something I can do myself but you can give me a good impression!

(...can you guess what topic I'm presenting to the Bible study group on tomorrow...)

[liv]

OK, I think I can do something useful with that. Apocryphal books fit really weirdly into the system of Torah + Talmud + commentaries, and that's something worth talking about. Thanks for the suggestion and clarification.

[lethargic_man]

The Books of Maccabees are on my to-read list; to date I've only read short passages. If you (liv) read them and blog about them, then I won't have to (blog about them).

Actually, that's a lie; I probably will anyway, as I won't react to them the way you do.

[liv]

That is very much not how I interpreted wychwood's question! Especially since the goal of this post was to suggest topics I can just talk about off-the-cuff without having to do a lot of research, I am definitely not planning to blog a detailed reading of the books themselves. So there's no overlap there, but I will point Wych to your analysis when you do get round to it.

[lethargic_man]

Sorry, poor wording on my part. I had more assumed you had read the books yourself already.

[damerell]

I came to LJ because everyone was on LJ. Now they've all gone to Facebook, which is just unspeakably awful. I don't understand people.

[liv]

Yes, I feel exactly the same. How can people possibly choose to run their social lives through Facebook, when it's so incredibly awful in so many ways? That might be a good topic for a rant too, though I do quite often post things about why FB is awful and I don't understand why it's consuming my social circles.

[damerell]

I think part of it is a familiar problem from another context.

Why does Exchange crop up so often in the corporate world, in spite of its unspeakable awfulness? Because it has a somewhat tolerable implementation of shared calendars and early on, nothing else did it at all.

So, what's Facebook do that LJ/DW doesn't?

[liv]

Yeah, it's at least partly network effect, everyone is on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook. My guess is that the killer features are: being able to find people you knew in previous stages of your lives; trivially easy sharing of snapshots even if you're completely non-technical about how photo-hosting works; and quite probably event planning. It is so easy to put up info about a party or trip on FB and invite all your friends and see who's coming and communicate with the people who are planning to be there. There probably are apps that do that better than FB, but they're never going to get off the ground if they require people to sign up to a particular service just so that they can invite their friends round for a video evening.

[damerell]

I think the calendaring is the killer, though. I can see people's FB photos without an FB account, and conversely if I sort out my own photo hosting they can see mine; there isn't any lock-in there. I realise this is not true of everyone, but I went to a boys' public school, and the only context in which I would wish to get in touch with the vast majority of my schoolmates would be one in which I had an ironbound alibi. But the event planning is a perpetual drag.

[pretty_panther]

I always mean to do this and then always miss the start so, yeah I will try to do it! I need to work out what it actually entails a bit more but yes, I shall try. I do post rather frequently anyway but maybe I could do some specific prompt posts where I don't cross post :P Might actually encourage so many that have DWs and don't log in to bother XD

[liv]

You're definitely not part of the problem of people signing up to DW and then leaving their journals mostly dormant / abandoned! Originally the idea of the Three Weeks fest was to post DW-only content without cross-posting. It was never very much more specific than that, from what I know. At this stage, when DW has an identity of its own, it's not just a protest vote against LJ, I'm not sure how necessary the "not cross-posting" thing is, it's almost certainly more useful to simply increase the volume of posting.

Some suggestions people have done:

Post every day for three weeks

Answer a set of DW-related questions

Post more creative stuff such as fanfic, icon sets etc, or perhaps ask for prompts to do more creating.

Offer rewards, whether creative stuff like icons and banners or DW points, for people who do things to make DW more active

Make a certain number of comments on friends' journals or posts to communities

Recommend good stuff on DW for other people to read, journals to follow or communities to join

Host friending or love memes

My community-building recipe last year, which is a bit easier than a post a day for three weeks, was: three diary entries, polls or surveys; ten posts with pointers to interesting stuff; one long form post about something other than just what you're up to.

Organize FONSFAQs, which are Frequently (Or Not So Frequently) Asked Questions, basically the idea is that you get people to explain topics that they're experts in to the wider world, and one person collates all the relevant posts into a master list. People talk about the countries or cultures they come from, the medical conditions they deal with, that sort of thing.

[pretty_panther]

Oh thanks for the info! I've gone ahead and set up a friending meme so brb, bugging every comm that allows it about ma meme XD

[liv]

That's looking really nice! Shall I promote it in the Three Weeks comm as well?

[pretty_panther]

thanks! i already have :) and i've fixed the code so the things are still pretty (purple) but much easier to read :)

[redbird]

Is there a good way to post photos (or other images) here directly/only? I know I can cross-post stuff from Flickr, but that's a bit different. (This came up recently when I was thinking in terms of some level of filtering/locking certain photos, but it would also be nice to put entirely public photos here rather than as "here are some Flickr links.")

[liv]

Basically, no. Photo hosting is one of several projects where the developers started out really keen, sorted out a good spec, put in a skeleton version and then stalled completely.

You can add images to posts and to a file hosting space on DW by posting by email. But it's really primitive and it doesn't look there's any meaningful ongoing progress in actually fleshing out the features.

[redbird]

Thanks. That's what I'd thought, but I was hoping I had overlooked something.

[kaberett]

From the IRC channel, I'm under the impression that we are actually still working on this!

[liv]

Ooh, that would be very cool. I haven't seen a word about it in any of the changelog posts, code tours or official news or development posts in absolutely months, so I assumed it had gone the way of things like the revamped update page or the smartphone app.

[kaberett]

I have no idea about the smartphone app - actually, that's a lie, I have heard people mention it recently in tones of Woe - but the revamped update page (as per beta) is still being tweaked and will SoonIsh be going universally live, I think? I am checking in and will get back to you!

[ursula]

If I had a photo I wanted to share in a locked post, I'd probably host it on Dropbox. That's obviously not completely secure, but it's not as public as adding something to a Flickr feed, and I'd have the advantage that my Dropbox files are already reasonably organized.

[forestofglory]

I'd really like to hear more about how your research is going, how you and your PhD student are getting on.

[liv]

I would definitely like to talk about that, but I'm not sure how suitable it is for a fest where the aim is increased visibility; it might be better to access-lock that much detail about work. I will mull on it.

[forestofglory]

Good point, maybe a post after the three weeks then.

[kerrypolka]

I'd be really interested in what you think about Anglo-Jewry and its funny internal politics, the Board of Deputies, how well all the branches get along (and don't), all that good stuff.

[liv]

Heh. I'm not sure that's a DW post, I think it's maybe a long, booze-fuelled rant with many digressions. But I will see what comes out if I just type whatever pops into my head.

[kerrypolka]

As far as I'm concerned, the closer those two things are to each other (in both cases), the better! :)

[liv]

Well, that's ok then. One rambly digressive rant coming up.

[ayngelcat]

In fandoms I've been involved in, it is't Facebook that everybody's gone to, but Tumblr (well - so it is said!). Can we talk about Tumblr, generally? I still prefer LJ and Dreamwidth but I'm interested in peoples' experiences.

[liv]

Yeah, for pseudonymous fannish interactions, obviously Facebook isn't even in the running. I quite substantially don't get Tumblr, I'm too old and too verbal rather than visual, but I will try to have an opinion about it. I think Tumblr can better coexist with DW than LJ can, because it seems much more possible to participate in both, but I don't know.

[moonreviews]

I've seen some other people on my friendslist doing the 3-weeks-for-DW-thing too (I got here through a friending meme on pretty_panther's journal and I was checking out people's journals...), so you're not the only one :)

The communities on DW are less active than those on LJ - communities are the only reason I'm still reading my LJ friendslist... though if they make the new friendslist with infinite scrolling and no opt-out I'll be gone from LJ.
Facebook is not suited for journal-style discussions, it's more like Twitter with more text and photos, I think. I don't have tumblr but I dislike their layout (too messy for me), so I'm not even going to try :P Hardly anyone I know has a tumblr account anyway (most people have Facebook and Wordpress).

[liv]

Hello, nice to meet you. I think most of the people doing 3W4DW picked up the idea from this post and my link in the community, but either way, the more people join in the better.

I don't know why communities never took off here. I think it's partly because there are better ways to interact with and find people and just form informal communities via personal journals than on LJ. But also because it's really hard to start a new community from scratch and build up enough momentum for it to feel like a vibrant place that will attract people to post. I still have some friends who are LJ-only, so I will be very sad indeed if they do force the infinite scroll friendslist on everyone.