bobquasit | The Future of LiveJournal

Rumors have been circulating that Yahoo may buy Six Apart, acquiring ownership of LiveJournal. The purpose would be to stick lots and lots and lots of advertising on each and every blog, apparently. I've been told by one who knows (

unquietsoul5) that Yahoo ruined GeoCities, which doesn't surprise me; I don't particularly dislike Yahoo, but if recent history has taught us anything, it's that you can't trust a corporation further than you can throw it.

But if I stay on that subject this could easily devolve into a rant.

Here's my question: what features would you like to see in LiveJournal or its successor? For me, it comes down to this:

1. Keep all the features that are already there.

2. No ads. I'll pay a subscription fee if I have to, but I don't want ads on my journal.

3. I'd like the ability to download complete HTML backups of my journals.

4. That includes comments on the entries. Everyone's comments.

5. I'd like to be able to find all of the comments I've made, no matter what journal they've been made on. Daily Kos can do it, so why not LiveJournal?

6. When I view my collected comments, they should of course have convenient links to their context.

7. And be easily downloadable, as a group, in HTML.

8. I would like to be able to include a large button on my journal. Each time this button is clicked on, by myself or anyone else, a spammer's head will explode.

Hell, I'd pay a hefty fee for #8 alone.

Added later:

9. It would be kind of cool if there was a "match" button that would search for other journals whose interests were closest to your own.

10. And what the hell, throw in another option for finding people whose interests are most opposite to your own.

11. I'd like to be able to friend journals, blogs, and people that aren't on LJ. I know that RSS makes that possible in some circumstances, but I'd like to have that expanded.

12. In that light, how about the ability to password-protect some entries? Then you could choose who to give the password to.

Added still later:

13. How about a decent text search? Google doesn't seem to be able to search LJ properly. Recently I tried to find a recipe I had posted here. I searched and searched, and nothing came up. I finally had to start looking through the topics month by month. To clarify, I want the ability to search all the text in any one journal. I also want to be able to text-search throughout all public posts made by anyone on LJ.