Not content at watching disaster happen while doing nothing, it looks like the LiveJournal community has decided to help those in need in Australia who have been struggling to survive in the wake of the natural disaster affecting the region.

In response to your requests, we’re pleased to offer a charitable vgift to aid flood relief efforts in Australia. We hope you’ll show your support by sending this vgift to friends. One hundred percent of proceeds will be donated to the Australian Red Cross (we’ll cover the processing fees). We thank you for helping us make a difference. (LiveJournal News)

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After reigning supreme as the only blog platform with an official iPad app, it looks like WordPress is finally being challenged upon Steve Jobs “magical” device.

LiveJournal has announced that it has relaunched their iPhone app as a universal app, which means LJ fans can finally blog on their iPads without having to super size the iOS application.

The new version of the LiveJournal iPhone/iPad app supports a full-screen display for the iPad. We’ve also made numerous improvements on the LiveJournal iPhone app.

Here are some of the key enhancements:

Adapted for the iPad (full screen interface)
Ability to view in horizontal mode
Adapted for the iPhone 4
Improved Filter Friends page
View links to other sites with the built-in browser
Spell-check and auto-correct for posts, comments, and messages
Text formatting improvements, including bold, italics, underline, and strikeout
Improved mapping of content
Improved performance and content rendering
Improved application stability with multiple bug fixes (LiveJournal Mobile)

Despite their late entrance upon both the iPhone and iPad, LiveJournal has done a phenomenal job in designing their iOS app to be not only extremely user friendly, but also to allow users to easily create lengthly content while on the go.

The only disadvantage the LiveJournal app has when compared against its WordPress rival is the the former lacks video uploading (a feature WordPress embraced in September).

While it’s good to see LiveJournal finally embracing the iPad, there is no word on whether they will embrace other platforms (like Android and Blackberry), which they will need to do if they want to challenge WordPress’s mobile domination in the future.

After remaining in a dormant state for almost a year in a half, the LiveJournal team has resurrected the iPhone app previously created by CosySoftware and have adopted it as their own.

We’re pleased to announce that the new LiveJournal iPhone app is available for free in the Apple store! Be sure to download the application labeled “LiveJournal Inc.” (Official LiveJournal News)

As far as creating content goes, the LiveJournal app is the most advanced mobile blogging app in the app store, one that rivals (if not exceeds) WordPress and Squarespace, as well as a host of third party apps. read more

It looks like “Tumblr envy” is spreading throughout the blogosphere as LiveJournal has joined WordPress (not to mention Typepad as well) in copying a feature that has set apart Tumblr from the rest of its rivals.

You can add a repost button that allows other users to share all or part of your entries on LiveJournal. Please note that you must disable auto-formatting to insert a repost button. This button is only intended for public entries (i.e., if your entry is marked friends-only and you add the repost button, the entry can be reposted publicly by others, although the original post will remain friends-only).  (Official LiveJournal Blog) read more

I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to blogging platforms, and my view of LiveJournal isn’t the rosiest. Then again, the platform does have 22 million registered bloggers, so it’s certainly not to be passed over.

The Russian-owned blogging platform will now allow its premium (i.e. paid) users to embed Google AdSense ads on their blogs.

The “Your Journal – Your Money” system means that LJ users with an AdSense account can add customised ads to their blog, in much the same way as any other AdSense publisher would. LiveJournal says it won’t take any of the profits (and if it’s based on individual AdSense accounts, how could it?) read more

Following Wednesday’s Twitter outage (in which the site is still recovering from), it looks as if there was a connection between Twitter going down, as well as Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube experiencing problems. read more

The Twitter denial of service attack is still keeping some users from posting tweets, although most of the people I’ve spoken to seem to have no issues. The official blog has some more information on the subject, and the Status Blog is of course a bit more technical. So in other words, don’t freak out if you can’t send your breakfast tweets or whatever, it’s just some nasty person trying to bring Twitter down.

More: LiveJournal and Facebook also affected.

LiveJournal finally published a press release regarding the restructuring of the company, which is fancy words for cutting parts of the workforce. Previous reports might or might not be a bit extreme, it is really hard to tell because the press release really doesn’t tell us much.

LiveJournal Inc.’s headquarters, technical operations (and servers,) legal, administration, and customer service teams will remain in the United States. LiveJournal’s global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the U.S. and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal.

As a result of these changes, Matthew Berardo, VP and General Manager of LiveJournal Inc., will be leaving the company along with other valued colleagues. Mr. Berardo played the leading role in consolidating product and design efforts to enable the business to more effectively streamline costs during his tenure. LiveJournal Inc. will now be led jointly by Stephanie Gravelle, currently LiveJournal Inc.’s director of finance and administration, and Sergei Komarov, currently CTO of SUP (LiveJournal Inc.’s holding company).

A press representative told me that “LJ laid off about a dozen employees, which is less than 20% of the entire LJ workforce”, a bit less than the previous report of 20 sacked employees posted by Valleywag. On the other hand, the PR rep talked about the entire workforce, which might mean something.

One thing is for sure, and that is that LiveJournal is in trouble. I personally find it unlikely to see this one go belly up, someone will pick it up before that happens, but you might want to hold on to your premium account dollars, at least for now.

Bad news for 20 employees at LiveJournal, they just got sacked, leaving only 8 left to run the now Russian social network. Vallyewag broke the story, and found this LiveJournal blog that tells of no severance package and a total lack of advance warnings. Ouch. I bet Six Apart is happy it sold the service to SUP in time.

Hopefully the LiveJournal service will not suffer too much because of this, but if I were a user I’d start getting backups. I doubt LiveJournal will go all JournalSpace on us, but still, you never know.

After being trained in “the ways of the blog” by Six Apart, LiveJournal is now finally migrating off of its former parents servers and is setting up shop in the middle of Montanna.

(LiveJournal News) The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We’re moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. [...]

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we’re going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

LiveJournal was previously sold to SUP (a media company from Russia) last year, although for some reason they remained on Six Apart’s servers. read more