Aye, he crossposted it to no_lj_ads, and it saved me compiling the same figures. His figures, and a few other sources, show LJ is declining both in total numbers and in market share. Alexa, weirdly, shows a massive spike 13 months ago that I can't explain other than potentially a plugin becoming available popular with LJers, other similar sites show no such spike.
But the Gartner studies are mostly bull, showing 'abandoned' blogs as people stopping blogging (I have at least 6 that would count as abandoned by their metrics, two of which have been transferred elsewhere, the rest are simply me registering my username).
Combing a reply to your other comment, if you're using Horizon, look down; FAQ and site links are at the bottom, the links at the top are for the end user to use their journal easily, the bottom stuff is for help/support/LJ stuff. And online FAQs are definatly not commonly read these days, I tend to refer to them, but people new to the web don't.
I think FAQs were a usenet thing that carried over, but now September doesn't end you need to spoon feed people. My big gripe with Vos is it's LJ lite, but apparently they're working on interfacing the two, soon you'll be able to 'friend' a vox, have it on yout friends page and the user can read your FO stuff (combing the feed and OpenID login), but that's not going as quickly as hoped (and it took a bit of hassling to get it considered in the first place).
They should've simply launched Vox as a different LJ entry point and given all the features to both sites, but that would've been clever...
Re LJ searching, I love Wordpress for the search functionality, and it can search everything if need be. You should be able to use an LJ search box to search your journal, or a friends, for anything you can see, regardless of whether spiders are enabled or not.
I, naturally, have my public posts fully searchable, I've made a few LJ friends through google searches (mostly citation search but one person found me via a google search for LJ vs MySpace...)
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But the Gartner studies are mostly bull, showing 'abandoned' blogs as people stopping blogging (I have at least 6 that would count as abandoned by their metrics, two of which have been transferred elsewhere, the rest are simply me registering my username).
Combing a reply to your other comment, if you're using Horizon, look down; FAQ and site links are at the bottom, the links at the top are for the end user to use their journal easily, the bottom stuff is for help/support/LJ stuff. And online FAQs are definatly not commonly read these days, I tend to refer to them, but people new to the web don't.
I think FAQs were a usenet thing that carried over, but now September doesn't end you need to spoon feed people. My big gripe with Vos is it's LJ lite, but apparently they're working on interfacing the two, soon you'll be able to 'friend' a vox, have it on yout friends page and the user can read your FO stuff (combing the feed and OpenID login), but that's not going as quickly as hoped (and it took a bit of hassling to get it considered in the first place).
They should've simply launched Vox as a different LJ entry point and given all the features to both sites, but that would've been clever...
Re LJ searching, I love Wordpress for the search functionality, and it can search everything if need be. You should be able to use an LJ search box to search your journal, or a friends, for anything you can see, regardless of whether spiders are enabled or not.
I, naturally, have my public posts fully searchable, I've made a few LJ friends through google searches (mostly citation search but one person found me via a google search for LJ vs MySpace...)