Video

There's a few things that I think are important and that I'm focussing on in my campaign which I'll go through with you now :) Firstly, LJ's communication with the user base. I know that pretty much everyone is frustrated by the way that newsletters and announcements have taken a very marketing orientated approach. What's obvious to me is that livejournal isn't your typical bunch of customers, and we're not very impressed at hearing about changes we might not like presented with spin. We react much better to clear and honest communication, and livejournal should definitely reasses the way they're handling this, it could be done better - we just need a lot more openness. The next thing that you can't avoid hearing about is censorship. As well as a social network, livejournal is a publication medium, but in the past, there's been some poor choices by the admin to block content that some people have found offensive, closing down communities and individual LJs based on keywords and interests and so forth. Livejournal should be all about allowing the users freedom of expression, the only limited should be the law. There are already good, functioning legal boundaries and precedents in existence to control what can and can't be published, and to my mind, livejournal should avoid treating its users as potential criminals and only step in when it's obvious that the law has been broken. we've got a very diverse user-base, and everybody has different ideas of taste and decency, but if you start listening to one group over the rights of another, then you wind up disenfranchising everyone and stifling the freedom that makes LJ such a great place to begin with. In a worst case, you make people go elsewhere, which doesn't do the community or the business any good at all. Due to international law, we actually own the copyright of the comments that we make, which has meant that in a few instances it has been possible for users to take each other to court just for duplicating the contents of comments. This doesn't promote a very healthy community environment to think that you could wind up with your LJ shut down for quoting someone's comment. The legality of this is arguable, but to protect itself, if they're served with a Digital Millenium Copyright Notice, livejournal will suspend your account until you either remove the offending post, or counter-file. This boils down to a problem with the DMCA itself, and LJ are basically acting to protect themselves, which is understandable, but it's not exactly the best solution. There is already an approach that pre-empts this, which is to provide settings to clearly flag an account such that any comments made are either public domain or CC-licensed. Photo hosting sites have this covered already, with some of them granting full permission for reproduction by default of their TOS, and others allowing the user to set this themselves. I think it would be very cool to be able to flag LJs as CC-licensed, and cut through any possibility of being served a DMCA notice and prevent potential legal wrangling. I don't think this should necessarily be the default, but if we had the tools, everyone could choose the approach that suited them best. The last thing I want to touch on for now, because it's been raised in a few campaigns relates to the possibility of a search function in livejournal. My first thoughts were that this is a really useful bit of functionality, but I'm also quite cynical of it, my IT leanings make me think that this is potentially a very sticky subject because it brushes on privacy issues. Livejournal serves adverts, and to increase their value, they're targeted according to information about the users or communities that they're served alongside. Most people will remember the press attention that Google got for scanning emails hosted with them for keywords, so that they could serve targetted ads. If livejournal offered a search, they will also have a list of your search terms over time, that they can correlate with your interests and usage patterns. This sort of approach isn't evil by definition, but private information of that sort can be badly misused. User privacy should be strongly protected - This time next year, you don't want to have to vote for someone who promises to remove the TERRIBLE AND EVIL search facility that started serving you those embarrassing adverts when you read your friends list at work. It's a great thing to throw ideas out there, but they do need to be thought out by someone who will consider the knock-on effects. Thanks for listening! If you like what you hear, please do share this video on your own LJ and remember to vote DeathBoy!