So long, LJ
For the sake of anyone still keeping an eye on this journal, it's time I wound things up - and directed you towards my new blog, Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job).

There are various reasons for moving on, not least that having left the BBC I feel freer to write under my own name. But that doesn't get to the core of it. LiveJournal was my first experience of the internet as an immersive social experience, rather than a reference and mail service. This journal started by accident, mostly because I was lonely in China and needed a window through which to spew at the English-speaking world - an experience I know a couple of my LJ friends can relate to. (It does occur to me that had I not become so immersed in the internet, I would have immersed myself more fully in my surroundings and my Mandarin would be a lot better...)

I almost let it drop after returning to England - LiveJournal, that is, not Mandarin - replaced by a mixture of face-to-face conversation and the discovery of other online environments, particularly the University of Openness and the Yahoo! Alan Garner group. What drew me back was the discovery that I had, without noticing, acquired a couple of mysterious LJ friends.

Up to that point, I'd assumed I was simply writing for a few "real world" friends. There was something heady about this new world of virtual social networks. I went exploring through the network of "interests". To be honest, I was disturbed by a lot of what I found: not because of any great innocence, but because I didn't know how to handle the intensity of pain and suffering which some people were pouring into their public journals. But I became more adept at filtering and finding interesting voices, including some wonderful writers whose thoughts and experiences it's been a pleasure to be let in on. (I'll still check my Friends page from time to time.)

It's a strange medium, this, patchy, casual and intense. It can be startling when you notice the absence of boundaries and conventions we take for granted in the old media. You start following someone's journal with a detached interest because you enjoy their thoughts on the world, and then after a few months they're hit by a major life event and you feel it with them. This happens with none of the editorial filtering that would apply to a newspaper column. People come and go, not posting for months, sometimes disappearing apparently forever. Once, a friend of someone whose journal I'd followed left a comment to ask if I'd seen or heard from him as he'd gone missing. I hadn't. I hope he turned up.

For myself, I don't know that I ever quite found the right voice for this journal. It was only a couple of degrees out, but it felt awkward, and I guess that's one reason why I decided to start somewhere else. But I'm glad I started here, because I probably wouldn't be involved in the work I'm doing now if I hadn't been drawn in to the potential of internet through this little corner of it.

Thanks for reading.

Dougald