I put 'em out, anybody can read 'em, and anybody can respond. I have no control of what happens after they go out.

This is how I feel about my LJ.

There are people here I really like, and enjoy reading whom I've never "friended" on lj, because it felt like overstepping.

This is how I feel about friending other people's LJs. There's people here I might want to friend, but I haven't because I wouldn't want to get "too close."

How do you follow blogs?

I type 'em in. But I thought we were talking about how we read LJ.

I take the friending so personally. There are a couple of people who I know IRL that never friended me. But naturally, I've never said, "Hey, friend me!" cause I figure they either haven't checked their lists or just don't care to friend me in LJ. Hell, I'm not sure I'd friend me in LJ.

Marzipan for Connie!

t still looking for the button that controls the "squash Marzie" foot.

Should I be disturbed on how quickly you found that, Empress?

Marzipan to eat! Not the dried out, either, the marzipan dough that can be mushed and molded and played with before you eat it and get that lovely almond sting on the tongue.

that is how I use LJ exclusively. I read LJ through my friendslist.

I'm not saying you should see it my way

This:

I guess I'm saying that to me, they're the same thing; people who've friended me are people who read me.

Makes it look like you're not describing your own behaviour, you're describing the behaviour of others. I'm not challenging how you use LJ. I'm challenging the assumption you seem to have made about how other people do.

Should I be disturbed on how quickly you found that, Empress?

Hee! I love Marzy.

I think of friending someone on LJ as the equivalent of bookmarking a regular blog. So I haven't necessarily told people I'm friending them, any more than I tell Slacktivist or the Smart Bitches that I've bookmarked their blogs.

I'm challenging the assumption you seem to have made about how other people do.

Which is why I backed off farther down and said "Gee, the way I thought everybody used LJ is actually just one paradigm for using LJ."

Seriously. I'm not (now) saying "This is how you should"; I'm saying "This is how I do, and I hadn't realized how many people do it differently".

In unrelated news, I am earwormed with "Last night I got loaded", and I didn't, and it isn't fair.

I thought we were talking about how we read LJ.

You mentioned Blogger, so I thought we were talking about that too. Never mind.

You say you friendslock to avoid Google. Do you distrust them following the HTML directives? Or is Google shorthand for "any search engine, some of whom don't play nice?"

I'm a big old whore for feedback and kind of act like I'm a columnist on lj...I can think of maybe five posts this year I even locked(I did stop short of calling it Crip and The City.) That said, I have a comparatively tiny friendslist and if you're on it, you're a Buffista or in H:LOTS or L&O fandom...I've never really thought about the other readers.