Comments on: LiveJournal puts in a school-browsing feature.

LiveJournal puts in a school-browsing feature.

Count Ziggurat — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 14:52:16 -0800

LiveJournal puts in a feature which lets you browse journals by schools. Schools from the United Arab Emirates to the Philippines to Siberia are browsable by location. The different perspectives make for interesting reading.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:11:33 -0800

At one level, this is neat since you can hook up with people who went to your school. At a very different level, it's creepy because most of the people listed for a given high school are still going there, given LJs demographic. Stalkers ahoy!

By: tapeguy

tapeguy — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:34:24 -0800

Yeah, this'll give school bullies and paedos an extra hand.

By: Jairus

Jairus — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:49:31 -0800

Yeah, this'll give school bullies and paedos an extra hand. Are you fucking serious?

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:09:10 -0800

Beaver High School. Awesome.

By: insomnia_lj

insomnia_lj — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:00:59 -0800

Not a particularly valuable feature, especially given that about half of LJ's users aren't students, and of those who are, only a very small fraction will add their school information to their journal's user info page. You'd be better off looking for a community for your given school, frankly... there are a lot of those on LJ. Give it a month and this feature will probably be buried in amongst LJ's rather voluminous feature set, and will soon be ignored and sadly neglected like many other prior features. If LiveJournal is going to do something really useful for browsing journals, they should add a feature I sugested many years ago now. Allow LJ members to search the directory in order to find others within X miles of the city they live in who are interested in _______. There are freely available lists out there of cities and their respective lat./long. information, and assuming you have that data, it is quite easy to do a search based on it. Another nice feature would be to allow users to flag certain interests they have as "non-public interests" only visible to certain groups of friends, or perhaps only to others who share the same interest. This way, your co-workers could stumble upon your journal and think "hm... seems innocuous enough" while others could take a look at your journal and think "kinky little sex freak!"

By: arcticwoman

arcticwoman — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:07:14 -0800

Not a very well maintained feature either, given that it seems Canada has about 50 provinces and territories (we only have 13). AB, ab, Ab, and Alberta are all different categories. I realize this is due to people categorizing themselves ineffectually, but they could have mods re-classify people correctly.

By: apple scruff

apple scruff — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:23:57 -0800

I don't know how effective it will be if people don't take it seriously. Then again, Livejournal is hardly the place for serious web browsing anyhow.

By: rolypolyman

rolypolyman — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:41:07 -0800

Is it possible to just search regular blogs by city/state/country? A search for who's blogging in my town is just limited to schools?

By: rolypolyman

rolypolyman — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:41:42 -0800

And what insomnia_lj said.

By: timory

timory — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 21:10:44 -0800

i was under the impression that you could search by location AND by interest at the same time. in fact, yes, yes you can.

By: Serena

Serena — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 21:49:03 -0800

Insomnia_lj, those are some great suggestions. Have you posted that in the new suggestions community?

By: Serena

Serena — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 21:49:57 -0800

Timory, that only lets you specify a city. I live in Houston, where someone could theoretically be 100+ miles from me and still live in Houston.

By: Samuel Farrow

Samuel Farrow — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 01:01:46 -0800

I so wanted to post to these people ljs and didn't.

By: deusdiabolus

deusdiabolus — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 08:07:19 -0800

Yeah, this'll give school bullies and paedos an extra hand. Or allow all the school geeks to plan some seriously massive forms of vengeance.

By: mendel

mendel — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 10:07:21 -0800

There's a team of volunteers who normalize the data as it goes. It's not just for current students, though, since it lets you list your graduation year. Classmates.com without the lifetime of spam.