An LJ is a blog. By any sane definition of what a blog is, LJ is included.
A lot, but not all, of the snobbery surrounding LJ as a platform has gone now, it's now seen as just as valid as Blogger or Wordpress.com.
There's definite merit in self hosting, or at the very least having a domain name for the blog, but there's also no reason why an LJ can't be taken seriously.
Specifically, before we both decamped to Dreamwidth for our primary hosts, miss_s_b and I were both in the top 100 Wikio blogs, she was frequently in the top 50 for theyorkshergob.
That was, partially, because I knew how to game the system a little bit, but it was also because many of the top blogs linked to her regularly. That was when she was using an LJ community for her 'blogging'.
Trackbacks are deprecated, most of the top blogs in the UK turn them off, PITA and full of spam. Discus is meh, I prefer LJ commenting, LJ needs to revamp the OpenID UI, but that's a specific problem that a paid user could overcome if they wanted. SEO is an issue, but LJs can have good SEO and pagerank, not as good as a blog using proper permalinks, but judicious use of tagging can be effective.
And definitely disagree re crossposting; turn comments off, yes, perhaps exerpts only, but abandoning existing casual readers'll piss them off.
Especially those of us that use LD/DW as our RSS readers of choice.
@Andrew.
300-500 readers per day is actually pretty good for a mid range unpromoted blog.
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A lot, but not all, of the snobbery surrounding LJ as a platform has gone now, it's now seen as just as valid as Blogger or Wordpress.com.
There's definite merit in self hosting, or at the very least having a domain name for the blog, but there's also no reason why an LJ can't be taken seriously.
Specifically, before we both decamped to Dreamwidth for our primary hosts,
That was, partially, because I knew how to game the system a little bit, but it was also because many of the top blogs linked to her regularly. That was when she was using an LJ community for her 'blogging'.
Trackbacks are deprecated, most of the top blogs in the UK turn them off, PITA and full of spam. Discus is meh, I prefer LJ commenting, LJ needs to revamp the OpenID UI, but that's a specific problem that a paid user could overcome if they wanted. SEO is an issue, but LJs can have good SEO and pagerank, not as good as a blog using proper permalinks, but judicious use of tagging can be effective.
And definitely disagree re crossposting; turn comments off, yes, perhaps exerpts only, but abandoning existing casual readers'll piss them off.
Especially those of us that use LD/DW as our RSS readers of choice.
@Andrew.
300-500 readers per day is actually pretty good for a mid range unpromoted blog.