LiveJournal Communities re: Interpreters

Here are some of the LiveJournal communities I found last night:

• aslterps: started 5 October 2003; c. 240 entries; last entry 18 August 2006.
• anti_bad_terps: started 5 March 2004; c. 40 entries; last entry 23 April 2006.
• certified_terps: started 2 February 2006; 14 entries, last entry 15 August 2006.
• itp_students: started 1 February 2006; 14 entries; last entry 23 July 2006.
• vrs_411: started 21 June 2006; four (4) entries; last entry 28 June 2006.

(By the way, it took me an ungodly amount of time to compile those data. Does no one know of an easy way for a LiveJournal Community visitor to see when the community was started and how many entries it has without having to page back through all the entries?)

I guess these really are more journaling “communities” rather than “blogs.” Online interpreter communities have been around for a long time, especially in the form of ListServ’s, Yahoo! groups, etc. These communities differ from ListServ’s in that they are out in the open for all the world to see. They each have their group originators and moderators, but no one person seems to be the main blogger of any of them. Some of the posts and comment discussions are interesting. For the most part, they don’t seem to “log the web” in the sense of providing links and commentary about other Web documents, as discussed in Journal vs. Blog. They are more a collection of discussions about either real or hypothetical interpreting situations, or bad experiences they had with other interpreters.

The most active and oldest community, “aslterps,” was started on October 5, 2003. It has about 240 entries, the most recent dated August 18, 2006. anti_bad_terps was started by an American deaf woman, and is really more about interpreters than by interpreters. itp_students and certified_terps were started on February 1 and 2 of this year, respectively, and each community has posted 14 entries in the last 200-some days. The newest community, vrs_411 was started on June 21, 2006, and has four posts, the most recent dated June 28.

I think the presence of these journaling communities is great. Those that don’t have many posts might yet catch on. There is quite a lot of commenting going on in some of these communities, so the entry count alone cannot encompass their activity level.

I’m still looking for an “interpreter blog,” but I will have to post more about that in a future entry. Now it’s time to go to work!