This Livejournal

[aggienaut]

   So, as promised, I am going to explain to you what this livejournal is and why its friended you. Its been two years now I believe since I friended most of you, though I think some were a year go. So I figure you've been patient enough.

   As you may have noticed, there is also a livejournal of emosnail. That is my "real" livejournal. (And as to that name, basically, long story short I already had a snail theme of names of my AIM screen name, email address, etc, and when creating a livejournal I was like, "ljs are so emo, so.. emosnail!"

In The Beginning
   It all began in 30 in 30 III, two years ago. As a prank my friend and fellow 30 in 30 participant shid, who apparently has mad skills at such things, made the "EMO-SNAL WILL DIE" fake photograph of graffiti. Initially I thought it was real though I wasn't concerned at all.

   Shortly Shid told me it was a joke I believe, or I caught on. One way or another, I decided to run with it. Obviously, "emo-snal" was supposed to be taken as just a misspelling of my ljs name. However, I got an idea!
   So I created an actual lj of "emo-snal." To make it seem real I backdated a month worth of entries leading up to the date of alleged death (the original image was dated to 2006, not 2007).
   But to seem real the LJ would also need FRIENDS!
   So I decided to go on a serial adding frenzy, under the theory that people tend to friend people back, so if you friend enough people you'll get a certain percentage of them to friend you back.
   To maximize the effectiveness of this procedure, I reasoned that people who had already friended serial adders were obviously proven to be likely to summarily friend people back. So I hunted down every serial adder I could find (starting with really obvious ones like serialadder) and added everyone that had added them back.
   And apparently it worked, as this livejournal now has MORE FRIENDS-OF THAN MY REAL ONE! O=
   And whats really perplexing, is that this livejournal seems to get more comments per entry on average than my real one. All I can imagine is that my real one has a lot of friends that don't actually use their ljs anymore. I dunno, but its a really odd statistic.


For Science!
   Anyway, obviously I continued to use the livejournal after that initial episode. As you may have noticed if you took a look at my last entry, I am very interested in finding more bloggers out there that are interesting to read and correspond with. The goal of this lj became to trawl for intelligent life.
   Additionally, I've used it as a sort of test bed to experiment with what makes an entry more likely to be read. Obviously the shorter the better, and in fact the original one line entries were pretty successful (as well as the second wave). Additionally I tried varying posting time and found that an entry is drastically more likely to receive comments if its posted around noon during a weekday than an evening. Its least likely to be read on a Sunday. I guess this indicates that people do most of their blog-perusing while bored at work.


The Future
   I'm thinking about trying to get back to the super short entries again for awhile to have a recent comparison to reactions to the relatively long recent entries. Also thinking about seeing how posting once a week compares to posting once a day. So much research to do!
   And you may ask why do this? My answer is that the purpose of blogging is to be read (in my opinion), and I therefore will endeavour to do what I can to maximize my effectiveness at that.
   Also thinking about loading up another round of serial adding (though I do consider the practice rather morally questionable I must admit).


In Conclusion
   Anyway, thanks again for friending me back and being around these last two years. I've gotten to know many of you through this and I have really appreciated the awesome new people I wouldn't have otherwise ever met.


Noteable Links
The Good Ole Days: Phase 1
The Good Ole Days: Phase 2
Initial Reactions: Round 1
Initial Reactions: Round 2

Comments

[qweenkaren.livejournal.com]

thanks for friending me, and providing me with something a little more interesting that a lot of the drivel out there. While I 'friended' you because you had some people I knew I was skeptical, and if your posts had annoyed me (by being illiterate and obnoxious) I would have deleted you from my friends.
Hence, well done! :)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much. (=