July 26, 2002

LiveJournal vs. Radio Userland

Christian Crumlish

Scot Hacker posted a comment to my LiveJournal blog asking me to compare LJ to Radio Userland in 50 words or less. This is an excellent challenge, and I think I'll take advantage of it by following up with a series of head-to-head comparisons. For additional reference, be sure to see these other excellent comparisons. This graf doesn't count toward the 50!

Superficially, LiveJournal seems geared more toward the diary type of blog, while Radio Userland seems a little more content-neutral, but functionally there's no real reason for this beyond the names of the products (or are they systems). Both provide community features, with comments and ways to see what other people on the same system are doing. LiveJournal facilitates links between and comments from others on the system. Radio users who share the same remote server (whether Userland or blogs.salon.com) can see who has posted recently, what are the most highly ranked posts (in terms of hits), and where referrers are coming from.

LiveJournal hosts your content on their servers. With Radio, your content database resides on your own computer, which the client software turns into a server for the purposes of the scripts that run the interface, but Radio also hosts the publicly viewable pages on central servers. If LiveJournal disappeared tomorrow and you had not backed up your posts, you‰d be s.ol. With Radio, you could point your client at another host server and be back in business right away.

Radio enables categories for classifying your posts and selectively supplying them to different front-ends (LiveJournal does not). Both products enable RSS feeds but, although I have only dabbled in this so far, my impression is that Radio's implementation is more sophisticated. Radio also comes with an RSS aggregator which makes it easy to choose stories for links in your blog. Another unique radio feature is a mirroring tool for duplicating your posts on other systems via the Blogger API.

Geez, that's 259 words and counting. I'll post a 50-word summary for Scot at my LiveJournal bodega.

Have I missed out on any important features or salient differences between these two systems?

Posted by xian at July 26, 2002 9:09 AM
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