Joe Wreschnig (piman) wrote in lj_biz,
Joe Wreschnig
piman
lj_biz

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Embedding idea

Throwing out an idea I had a few seconds ago. No clue if it's feasible. Sparked by something I wrote here.

Some introduction. Raph Levien runs Advogato, a small weblog and diary site for free software programmers. He also happens to have a LiveJournal, although he hasn't updated it (that I can see). Since I won't be home for another 3 hours (no email), someone else might want to bring him into this before then.

Now, the actual idea. Some sort of bridge between Advogato and LJ, since there seems to be a lot of crossover in users. Now, there's a couple possibilities I'm thinking here.

a) Registering a user account at Advogato registers you on LiveJournal. Syndicate the same journal at both sites.
GOOD: Simple.
BAD: Namespace pollution. You either have to not take the name of a LJ person to sign up for Advogato, or you have to append _advo or something to the end. Annoying.

b) Vice-versa of a.
GOOD: Simple.
BAD: Advogato is small compared to LJ. Throwing a bunch of user accounts at it is probably going to do some serious harm. Also, most LJ users are not programmers (but most Advogato users seem to keep lots of non-programming tidbits in their diary).

c) Unified client
GOOD: Nothing, really.
BAD: Double data being sent on each entry, and afaik, Advogato doesn't have the same kind of authorization as LJ (I think it uses cookies, I never really looked).

d) Embed Advogato journals in LJ.
GOOD: Simple.
BAD: I can't find a journal exporting feature for Advogato.

e) Embed LiveJournals in Advogato
GOOD: Simple, fast, LiveJournal has export features, and there are tons of scripts to do it already.
BAD: Anyone see a bad here?

Obviously, I'm thinking e. So, my idea is basically to have another field in Advogato, "Use LiveJournal user: someone". If you have that checked and a name in there, it displays that journal instead of your normal diary.

Possibly, the same thing could be done (for example) with SourceForge's diaries. And I'm sure there's sites out there that aren't for geeks that would benefit from something like this too. The only reason I mentioned Advogato first is because Raph is on LJ, and because I know there's a lot of crossover between the two (most people I know don't use SF's diaries, they prefer Advo).

Comments? Additional ideas? Or is this just crazy?
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