LiveJournal puts in a school-browsing feature.

September 27, 2005 2:52 PM

LiveJournal puts in a feature which lets you browse journals by schools. Schools from the United Arab Emirates to the Philippines to Siberia are browsable by location. The different perspectives make for interesting reading.
posted by Count Ziggurat (15 comments total)

At one level, this is neat since you can hook up with people who went to your school. At a very different level, it's creepy because most of the people listed for a given high school are still going there, given LJs demographic. Stalkers ahoy!
posted by smackfu at 3:11 PM on September 27, 2005

Yeah, this'll give school bullies and paedos an extra hand.
posted by tapeguy at 3:34 PM on September 27, 2005

Yeah, this'll give school bullies and paedos an extra hand.

Are you fucking serious?
posted by Jairus at 3:49 PM on September 27, 2005

Beaver High School. Awesome.
posted by brownpau at 4:09 PM on September 27, 2005

Not a particularly valuable feature, especially given that about half of LJ's users aren't students, and of those who are, only a very small fraction will add their school information to their journal's user info page. You'd be better off looking for a community for your given school, frankly... there are a lot of those on LJ.

Give it a month and this feature will probably be buried in amongst LJ's rather voluminous feature set, and will soon be ignored and sadly neglected like many other prior features.

If LiveJournal is going to do something really useful for browsing journals, they should add a feature I sugested many years ago now. Allow LJ members to search the directory in order to find others within X miles of the city they live in who are interested in _______. There are freely available lists out there of cities and their respective lat./long. information, and assuming you have that data, it is quite easy to do a search based on it.

Another nice feature would be to allow users to flag certain interests they have as "non-public interests" only visible to certain groups of friends, or perhaps only to others who share the same interest. This way, your co-workers could stumble upon your journal and think "hm... seems innocuous enough" while others could take a look at your journal and think "kinky little sex freak!"
posted by insomnia_lj at 5:00 PM on September 27, 2005

Not a very well maintained feature either, given that it seems Canada has about 50 provinces and territories (we only have 13). AB, ab, Ab, and Alberta are all different categories. I realize this is due to people categorizing themselves ineffectually, but they could have mods re-classify people correctly.
posted by arcticwoman at 5:07 PM on September 27, 2005

I don't know how effective it will be if people don't take it seriously. Then again, Livejournal is hardly the place for serious web browsing anyhow.
posted by apple scruff at 5:23 PM on September 27, 2005

Is it possible to just search regular blogs by city/state/country? A search for who's blogging in my town is just limited to schools?
posted by rolypolyman at 7:41 PM on September 27, 2005

And what insomnia_lj said.
posted by rolypolyman at 7:41 PM on September 27, 2005

i was under the impression that you could search by location AND by interest at the same time. in fact, yes, yes you can.
posted by timory at 9:10 PM on September 27, 2005

Insomnia_lj, those are some great suggestions. Have you posted that in the new suggestions community?
posted by Serena at 9:49 PM on September 27, 2005

Timory, that only lets you specify a city. I live in Houston, where someone could theoretically be 100+ miles from me and still live in Houston.
posted by Serena at 9:49 PM on September 27, 2005

I so wanted to post to these people ljs and didn't.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 1:01 AM on September 28, 2005

Yeah, this'll give school bullies and paedos an extra hand.

Or allow all the school geeks to plan some seriously massive forms of vengeance.
posted by deusdiabolus at 8:07 AM on September 28, 2005

There's a team of volunteers who normalize the data as it goes. It's not just for current students, though, since it lets you list your graduation year. Classmates.com without the lifetime of spam.
posted by mendel at 10:07 AM on September 28, 2005