Thursday, March 11, 2004

You people are SO not helping

Had some ideas for an entry that was all AOL-J community building.  Tried to follow up on them.  Lemme tell you -- 40 minutes of failure -- that's what I got.

Idea the first:  Use the AOL-J search feature to search other journals for something that really interests me, and see if I can find a kindred spirit. 
- Searched for "Snowglobes."  Got one hit -- they were mentioned briefly in this person's bio. 
- Searched for "Hyperion" (the name of a novel I rather liked), got no hits.
- Searched for "Avenue Q" (the name of a musical I've been thinking about lately) -- got a few hits, including one I am responsible for.  Did hit this journal, amusingly entitled "Why I hate the Boston Red Sox, love Hugh Jackman and other ramblings."  Didn't say much about "Avenue Q," but there's quite the Hugh Jackman photo gallery, and I can't really object to that.

Idea the second:  Go on a link walk.  Jump to the first journal I link to, jump to the second journal that person links to, jump to the third journal that person links to, and so forth.  I'd been hoping to get up to 10, but I ended up hitting a brick wall much earlier.  The problem (at least, the problem for this particular venture) is that people link to journals outside of AOL, and once you've followed a link out, it is unlikely you'll get linked back into the system -- and my goal here was to find other AOL Journals to poke around.

Idea the third:  Go back to the search function, find someone's journal that has a bunch of those "getting to know you" questions on it, and answer them.  While there may be a journal out there with such a thing, it didn't easily pop up in the search engine.

I give up.  What do you folks do to find other members of AOL-J you might like to connect with?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

i still do journal walks... but you're welcome to come visit me, if you want... i have a couple of snowglobes, i like them, but not many unfortunately... i like musicals, although i'm lame about it, and i am an avid reader, but i probably read crap compared to you... but come visit anyhow.. i love meeting new ppl! ~liz (perfect moments)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the invite. I liked dropping by. :)

Anonymous said...

Hi there - I found your journal via link walking, but generally what I do is when I stumble on an interesting journal, I go through all of their links rather than just one. Yours was linked from jeffcomedy's, but I cannot remember how I linked to his in the first place. The most amusing part is this all started because I did a J-search for "second marriage" and now several hours later, here I am. Haha! - K. :)
http://journals.aol.com/kiskar/FateandAction

Anonymous said...

I give each Journal my book reading test. After reading a book's synopsis and the first page snippet, I crack a book open somewhere in the middle and if the writer hooks me, I'll buy the book. A Journal writer must similarly capture my interest, especially now that AOL-J has expanded and there are so many good ones out there.

Out of the many Journalers I've met in the last few months, there's only a few (based on common interests) that I feel I could be friends with in real life.