No, I mean specifically that I friendslock to avoid the information being generally available. Friendslock is a (perhaps not very reliable) way for me to keep my diary out of general hands. I was under the impression that search engines couldn't (not didn't choose to, but couldn't) get to friendslocked posts.

who are the people I actually know.

And because LJ names are frequently vastly different from RL names or usernames in other communities, if someone friends me because we know each other, it would be nice of them to let me know, so I have sufficient information to choose to reciprocate or not. I've unintentionally blocked at least 2 RL friends from reading my personal posts because they never bothered to tell me their LJ names.

I don't read anything without an RSS feed because I'm lazy that way -- all of my blog-reading is done on LJ or Bloglines.

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."

And yet, I never feel the other way around. When I see someone has added me (and I've given precious little reason for anyone to do so, for a few months) I'm flattered.

I almost never lock anything any more, though. At the beginning, I locked everything. Now, I either say it, or don't. The few exceptions have been times that I've asked a question that I didn't want to ask the world (like, "Um, did I handle this okay") or something similar.

Speaking of LJ, does someone (Cindy?) really have a LJ-->buffista list out there? Because I could really use something like that.

I was under the impression that search engines couldn't (not didn't choose to, but couldn't) get to friendslocked posts.

They can't, but you can avoid compliant search engines without friendslocking, which is why I asked.

I use LJ more and more extensively as an aggregator

I aggregate in two places, LJ and Bloglines -- with some overlap. And then there are still blogs I visit by hand, because both aggregators mangle the presentation, and I like going round and visiting. In fact, sometimes I visit LJs that I've friended so I can see it in their format, not in my format, and not squished next to everyone else's. Aggregating kills browsing for me, and takes away some of the individual feeling.

I emailed Aimee a list based on her own FLs. I think when she had Em, she lost track of who was who. I am behind now, though. If I can find the email I sent to Aimee, I'll send it to you, but I bet there aren't any surprises on there.

The problem with LJ's setup is that friending both adds that person to your reading list, and allows them access to your locked entries. And to me, those two actions don't always go together. There are people whose blogs I find interesting who I don't think need to know about my personal life. (The solution is to add them to my Bloglines roll instead of my LJ friendslist, but it's not ideal.)

There are a few people on my flist who I've lost track of who they are here. I never ask because I don't want to look insensitive/stupid.

Jessica, I think you can group lj friends, and then make your friendslocked entries only accessible to those in certain groups. So you could have a "read 'em, but don't wanna tell 'em about my love life" group and a "TMI buddies" group and so on.

They can't, but you can avoid compliant search engines without friendslocking, which is why I asked.

Google's blog search was showing friendslocked posts for a few days, but I believe they've fixed it now. (If you clicked through to the locked post, you got LJ's "you don't have sufficient permission" page, but the first few lines did show up in the search results.)