Slashdot Mirror
SixApart Sells LiveJournal to Russian Media Company
molrak writes "SixApart tonight announced the sale of journal/blogging service Livejournal to Russia-based SUP. Original LJ founder Brad Fitzpatrick has chimed in on the situation: 'This is pretty cool because - They're ridiculously excited about LiveJournal, and have been for awhile (they previous purchased advertising rights in Russia, but ended up doing a bunch of Russia-specific LJ development as well). They want to throw a lot of resources at LiveJournal in terms of product development and engineers. "LiveJournal.com, Inc." now stands alone again, focusing on nothing but LJ. Sounds like I'll have more LJ influence (via new role as advisory board member) than I've had recently.'"
Yeah it's called "caucasian". Note that the Caucasus mountains, the origin of the word, are IN Russia.
You may be joking, but there appears to have been a considerable amount of concern about this when SUP first got involved with LJ -- Alexander Mamut, one of SUP's main investors (or possibly its owner -- I've seen both descriptions in articles), apparently has some ties to Putin. Brad had tried to assuage fears about it at the time, but I unfortunately don't really know how the situation stands on the Russian side after those initial reactions.
As a longtime LJ user, I'm encouraged that Brad's still optimistic about SUP today, and I don't think Six Apart ever really knew exactly what to make of LJ, but I'm still having a hard time getting over a vaguely uneasy feeling about the whole thing.
So I'm sure a lot of American Slashdotters are thinking: "What? A Russian Company buying an American Company? Where did they get the dough?"
From : http://www.econstats.com/weo/V012.htm
Share of World Economy %
country 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
United States 21.68 21.34 21.13 20.97 20.85 20.71 20.57
Russia 2.36 2.42 2.46 2.55 2.60 2.66 2.69
Italy 3.22 3.20 3.12 3.01 2.91 2.84 2.79
France 3.34 3.33 3.27 3.17 3.10 3.04 2.98
Spain 1.81 1.82 1.81 1.78 1.75 1.72 1.70
China 10.92 11.47 12.07 12.68 13.18 13.59 13.99
India 5.45 5.54 5.65 5.83 5.91 6.05 6.17
I wish this chart went back further to really accentuate how much has changed over the past 15 years. The point being... Slowly but surely the world economy is getting more evenly distributed around the globe.
If you look at the backstory for the rise of SUP, the whole thing started when the abuse team tried to apply American standards to Russian bloggers. You see, the Russian internets culture is different. You post whatever you want to post. For example, if you feel that you want to personally execute every member of [insert group of people here], burn the corpses in a fire, and piss in the ashes, then you should definitely blog about it. Self-censorship is for wimps and politicians. A few years ago, American lj abuse members attempted to ban some Russian bloggers (for posting something about murdering NATO soldiers, iirc). The Russian blogosphere exploded in indignation, and the lj management decided that the only way to sort out what was going on with its Russian-speaking users was to offload them to a Russian company. Hence, SUP, which acquired the rights to the Russian-speaking part of lj last year - and now, has bought the whole service.
If the behavior that SUP has found acceptable in its segment of lj is anything to go by, lj filtering and censorship may be set to disappear entirely.
As a linguist studying minority languages of Russia, I do field work in places where the Putin-aligned local government has had no qualms sending goons to beat women and the elderly with pipes just for speaking or singing songs in the local indigenous language, and opposition figures still get sent to psychiatric hospitals whenever they dare to challenge the ruling party. When has that last happened in the US? Certainly there are some worrying developments in civil liberties, but people can breathe a lot more freely there than in Russia, which is truly one of the scariest places I've visited.