person mildly annoyed by internet shock

I had a quick scoot around the internet news sites looking to see if anyone had anything better than the conspiracy theory (Six Apart orchestrated the power outage in order to encourage people to use their pay-per-blog Typepad) to offer by explaination. Admittedly, the time difference isn't really in my favour here, but I was mildly disappointed not to find anything, not even from Livejournal themselves ...

Although I did find plenty of news stories, but after Indymedia I gave up as they were all saying the same thing (do feel free to catch the hilarity over on slashdot) which was that sure, some people couldn't publish to their blogs, but these were unimportant people. Women, young people, artists, non-techies. No-one who matters. Heck, isn't it mostly full of Russians?

So, I was mildly annoyed by this. Not very annoyed, because I certainly do have one teenage girl on my friendslist, at least one Russian, some artists, and plenty of women (in addition to people like Kimya Dawson, Momus and Warren Ellis, who I think might be considered to have some mild celebrity status) and I'm well aware of my own unimportance.

Which is, of course, part of the point of having a Livejournal. It's levelling. Because of its low entry threshold, community features, friendslist, syndiction features and sheer pride in its own size, Livejournallers can't help but be aware that they're speaking from within a vast crowd. Even if this isn't always 100% visible from the ivory blogspots (or moveable type swearboxes, or I-tooled-this-myself castles) of the blogging elite (whomsoever they are this week), that's what everyone's doing on the internet.

So go ahead, peer down your nose. If you're short-sighted enough, you might not notice that you're looking at a mirror.

And here's a quick ego test: of the 2470095 active livejournallers out there, does anyone care about your blog enough to have syndicated you?