LiveJournal grew out of one 18-year-old's frustration with Web journaling. Now Brad Fitzpatrick is on top of a blog revolution.

When Brad Fitzpatrick was 18, he had just relocated from Portland, Ore., to Seattle to study computer science at the University of Washington. Like most transplants, he wanted to keep friends informed about his life, so he developed a database-driven method of updating his online journal. Seven years later, his nifty little invention has blossomed into the 8 million-strong community known as LiveJournal, and Fitzpatrick, at the ripe old age of 25, has become one of the major players in the burgeoning universe known as the blogosphere.

In January, Fitzpatrick sold LiveJournal.com (often abbreviated as LJ) and its parent company, Danga Interactive, to Six Apart of San Francisco and relocated to the Bay Area a month later. He continues to run LJ as an independent entity, but is now free to concentrate on the technical side of things and leave business and marketing to his new partners.

LiveJournal has started a revolution in Internet blogging by combining private journals with public forums. Emphasizing community and networking over editorial grandstanding and intimacy over audience, LJ opened up Web logging as a means of individual expression. Users of the free service create journals built around their interests, filled with a panoply of pictures, biographical details and customized layouts.

Visiting the LiveJournal community is akin to being a tourist in a thriving new country: It's diverse, lively, eccentric and daily expanding its population by the thousands. LJ communities cater to high school and college students, culture and politics, hobbies and obsessions; special-interest forums have sprung up catering to everything from cooking to Proust to fan fiction to furries (aficionados of anthropomorphic animals).

Fitzpatrick himself marvels at what's out there in LJ-land. "I don't know a lot about the LiveJournal communities," he says. Kicking back on a couch in the rambling, industrial-chic South of Market warehouse that LJ shares with Six Apart, the disarmingly low-key entrepreneur is, fittingly, surrounded by a workforce of rockers, geeks and college kids reflective of LJ's eclectic demographic. "But some of the communities are downright odd. Like the whole furry thing, or that thing where people are doing celebrity role-playing. One of the most popular communities for a while was called Naked Parts. I just recognize it as being this big, diverse chaos."

LJ's diverse chaos extends beyond its own borders. Because its software is open source, its platform has spawned numerous clone communities, and many popular Web sites -- including Slashdot, Wikipedia, HowardStern.com and at least one high-traffic porn site -- use LJ infrastructures.

The LJ odyssey began when Fitzpatrick got frustrated by available journaling tools. No stranger to developing tools, having already begun his first Internet company, FreeVote.com, in high school, he wanted an easy way to make quick updates to his Web site. So he wrote a journal program for his desktop and began posting dozens of times a day with pertinent messages like "Going to get a Mountain Dew now" and "Doing my laundry."

A friend asked for a copy of the program, then another. And another. Finally, tired of having to update multiple servers, Fitzpatrick began running the journaling program from his own server and left the registration page open.

If you build it, they will come. And soon they did, by the thousands. "First there were a hundred people using it, and I sort of knew everyone," he recalls. "Then there were a thousand people using it, and I definitely didn't know everyone. And it just kept growing."

In 1999, he registered his creation under the name LiveJournal ("At that time, the term 'blog' didn't even exist"). New features were added. Some, such as user pictures and profiles, aided communication between users. Others, such as the option of allowing a post to be viewed only by a user's listed friends, were born of necessity.

"Friends would write about waking up drunk in a ditch after a party, and all their friends would laugh. Then their parents would read it," says Fitzpatrick. "So finally someone asked if there was a way to make a drunken-party post that their parents couldn't see. So that's how the friends thing came about. And the friends-page aggregator (rounding up friends' posts in one place) came about because we were all too lazy to go to each other's journals one by one."

LJ graduated from hobby to business when Fitzpatrick's server crumbled beneath the weight of LJ's success. He asked Journalers to contribute for expansion. Soon more servers were needed, and more. Paid LiveJournal accounts, allowing extra features, were added to fund LJ's growth. Volunteers and employees (now numbering eight to 12, depending on whether school is in session) arrived to help maintain them. When Fitzpatrick graduated from college, he opted to make LJ his full-time job.

There have been glitches along the road to success. Last year, LJ crashed for two days when someone at one of the offices pushed "a big red button" that cut power to the servers. "They thought it opened the door to the bathroom," sighs Fitzpatrick.

As blogging grew in popularity, Fitzpatrick began receiving offers for LJ. He says he chose Six Apart because "they had the right vision and the right cultural fit. I didn't think they'd mess with it. I wanted to remain a part of it and I wanted it to be fun, and being fun didn't mean trying to extract every last cent from users. I wanted to work on something innovative, something I'd use myself. I'm probably the site's biggest addict."

Six Apart founders Ben and Mena Trott have at least two things in common with Fitzpatrick: youth and a do-no-evil approach to Internet commerce. They were 24 in 2001 when they developed their hugely popular Movable Type software for blogging, and Mena Trott said she thinks LJ and Six Apart are a perfect marriage between two styles of online journaling.

"LiveJournal is an amazing community-building tool," she says. "Blogs can maintain a personal voice, but the tools themselves dictate what goes in. Movable Type is more focused on the posts themselves and the presentation. It's not that one approach is better than the other; they're just different. Each has its own benefits for different audiences."

Fitzpatrick agrees. "LiveJournal was never really polished, because that was never our focus. That was a big part of my decision to work with Six Apart. They've really shown that they care about the little details, and they're working at making the site more usable without making it annoying."

At first panic ensued among LiveJournalers worried that Six Apart would turn their world into a corporate entity plastered with pop-up ads. Says Fitzpatrick, "I was expecting it. All you can say is, 'OK, go use another site for 12 months and then come back and see if we've gone evil.' After a few months, people realized we were actually doing more cool things and releasing more open source than we were prior. So I think they've largely calmed down."

While the two companies share many functional aspects, LJ has remained committed to keeping its software open source (free for all to take and use). "I like to stick to my principles, and it's really paid off for me," Fitzpatrick says. "People say it's like the hippie communal thing to do. We shouldn't be competing on basic infrastructural stuff. If you're having a race, it should be about who can run the fastest, not who can first build the smoothest road and then run the fastest. We don't care if people know how our stuff works. Users will keep using LiveJournal because that's where their friends are."

There are differences between the worlds of blogs and LJs. LiveJournal's user base skews young, drawing a large proportion of teenagers, whereas blogging tends to attract users in their late 20s and early 30s. Additionally, LJ is seen as a private space for networking and interpersonal discourse; blogs are viewed as one-person publications directed toward a larger audience. A growing number of people maintain both an LJ and a blog, but the two camps traditionally don't mix, with some bloggers dismissing Journalers as trivial kids and Journalers mocking bloggers as wannabe Web stars.

Fitzpatrick and the Trotts hope to erase some of those assumptions, especially after Six Apart introduces its Comet platform -- expected out next year -- which will combine the public platform of blogging, the community interaction of LiveJournal and the networking of sites like my MySpace.com.

"I think the Internet is finally starting to do what it should have been doing from the beginning," says Fitzpatrick. "The vision was there in 1990, but it's only recently that the software's caught up and people are starting to use it in fun ways."

For his part, Fitzpatrick is enjoying his new office and new hometown, biking to Six Apart's sprawling offices from the Bernal Heights house he shares with his fiancee, Dina, and a Boston terrier. Having already begun and sold two companies in the first quarter-century of his life, he figures he'll hold down the LJ home front for a while yet, continuing to develop open-source tools, helping, in his own way, to reconfigure the landscape of the Internet.

"I haven't really given future plans any thought," he says, shrugging. "Why? I'm still having fun."