I don't use LJ or any other popular blogger for publishing. Let me explain why. I personally could use blog for one reason only - I view blog as knowledge base with possibility to make certain parts of it accessible to people. The concept of "Knowledge base" is very much disputable, I see it as a carefully classified information snippets collection. The key thing here is "carefully classified". A simple categorization is not enough, each snippet has to be classified in several dimensions. For instance, I might have certain pieces related to IBM, and other pieces related to HPC (high-performance computing). Then, the article about "Deep Blue" I would assign to both classes - IBM and HPC to make the future references easier.
It is a very modern area of research nowadays - ontologies, Semantic web, semantic blogging and the like. However I don't think blogging needs all that technology now, all it needs is a multi-dimensional classifiaction, as I described it here. A certain central structure of available classes is also nice-to-have. For instance, in addition LJ could contain a central list of keywords, meaning of which are unambigous, which people can use as classes for their postings. For example, central directory could contain a tree-like list like this
- Companies - IT - IBM - Sun Microsystems - Microsoft - SAP - FMCG - Nestle - Kraft - P&G - IT area - ERP - Web
Thus, I could list, for instance, everything classified as "Microsoft" and "ERP" to find out any activity of Microsoft on ERP market. This is more close to so-called "Semantic blogging" and I tend to think it to be quite utopian idea, and not urgent at all. Simple multi-dimensional user-specific classification would be enough for the beginning.
Of course, to make any use of such classifications, we need to add some sort of query language.
Links:
http://nudnik.ru - russian blog engine that is exactly the concept I'm talking about (check small keywords after # sign. Some posts contain several keywords.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_style/237565.html - simple one-dimensional categorization in LJ. The number of entries in each category is huge, very difficult for searching.
http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_dev/664279.html - parts of the discussion is relevant, my post doesn't care at all about the "Friends" concept
http://jena.hpl.hp.com:3030/blojsom-hp/blog/ - Semantic Blogging demonstrator, scroll to the bottom to see the categories.