LiveJournal continues to fascinate. TheFerrett has posted a quiz for LJ users, about their LJ use. The quiz is LJ in a microcosm -- sprawling, juvenile, and deeply, effortlessly, and utterly self-absorbed. The categories of LJ behavior covered are Community, Memesheep (LJ has turned morphed 'meme' from description to label, using it for "Talk Like A Pirate"-ish trends), Original Content, Psychodrama, and Attention Whoring. Two things jump out. First, because LJ fuses blog, BBS, and Friendster patterns (and did long before Friendster launched), it is a test range for explosive social issues, like the fact that friending has become a transitive verb _and_ a binary operation, the fact that your social standing is based in part on a numeric friend count, or the odd relationship between truth and ficiton in self-reporting services. Some of my favorite quiz questions, for what they reveal about LJ, are:

Have you ever...

- Talked with your real life friends about your LJ friends as if they should know them?  
- Friended someone based on their LiveJournal icon? 
- Felt guilty for not friending someone back? 
- Made a LiveJournal account for a fictional character
...and had other people believe that it was someone real? 
...and then killed off your fictional character just to get a reaction, and succeeded? (Yes, this has happened.) 

- Created a new journal just to hide from someone? 

- Broken up with someone you were dating and unfriended them? 
...and lost an entire cadre of other friends in the process? 

- Left someone on your friends list only because it would create too much trouble to take them off? 
...and created a filter you used by default so you wouldn't have to read them?  

- Utilized a script or other program to tell you who's friended and unfriended you? 

- Plotted out how you were going to write a LiveJournal post about a particular activity as you were attending that activity? ("Okay, so Suzie just fell in the Jell-O - that's my opening lead-in...") 

- Approached your LJ entries as if they were professional writings - complete with proper spelling, good organization, and attention to grammar? [Telling - ed.]
  
- Requested feedback from your readers about whether you should change an aspect of your personal appearance? ("Should I cut my hair?") 
...and then posted before-and-after pictures when you did it? 

- Fought with a friend over who was going to write up a funny incident? 

Meanwhile, most of the items listed on the quiz, unlike the ones copied here, are common to mailing lists, usenet, BBSes, etc. Nevertheless, things like topic drift, privacy spills, and falling in love or bed with someone you first meet online are presented as if they are unique to LJ. As with believing that your particular high school crowd was unique in some important fashion, it may be necessary for a community to think that such effects mark them as special somehow. I certainly felt that way on usenet in the early 90's. There's also some writeups of the results on TheFerrett's journal.