A big development over at LiveJournal

LiveJournal (LJ) is a popular blogging tool in Russia, with over 600,000 bloggers who use cyrillic alphabet. It has a nice set-up for networking: one can comment on other people's blogs, add people to 'friends', create communities and read all the friends' messages on one page -- kind of like MySpace minus the graphics.

The Russian segment of LJ has long attracted prominent personalities, and the community is highly charged and politically polarized. Neonazis hate the anti-fasists (antifa) and vice-versa, liberals regularly fight with conservative nationalists, etc.

In comes a team of businessmen, Alexander Mamut and Anton Nossik, who want to tap into the money-making potential of the blogosphere. They want to create an blogging-entertainment portal, and make money off the context-tailored ads that they will insert in their blogs.

Nossik is an internet guru; he created rambler.ru, a search engine; lenta.ru, a news portal; and a couple of other news portals, one of which is Kursor -- Israeli News (http://www.cursorinfo.co.il/). Mamut is an oligarch, a banker who later became an economic advisor to the President Putin's team. A connection with Israel is alleged (dual citizenship?), in any case, his heritage is emphasized on many sites.
Their partner is an American, Andrew Polson, owner of a publishing house and another internet portal.

For a couple of weeks rumors were flying that they were approaching various blogging outlets with offers. And then the other day, the blogspace is abuzz with the news that they DID essentially buy out the Russian part of LJ. A wishy-washy message about it, in English, went out from the main LJ administration.

Mamut, Nossik and Polson's company, SUP-Fabrik, acquired the license to provide services to the russian users of LJ from the parent company, Six Apart. They will transfer content to servers in Russia, beef up features, provide their own tech support and a newly created Abuse Team.

The nationalist segment of LJ went nuts. They are especially concerned with the Abuse Team, and that its presence will essentialy mean censorship. The was a rumor, later turned out to be a hoax, that Nossik (and he is himself a #1 rate blogger in LJ), speaking as SUP officer, expressed concern with the 'nationalist tendencies' in LJ. Privacy and copyright are other top concerns, since the management will have access to private online entries ( or so the people surmise, there is no developed legal system in Russia to prevent them from doing so). One prominent blogger deleted his journal in a huff, a few others did the same or threatened to, and still more others changed their preferences to 'appear' to be from another country.

Although there is a certain glee at the plight of nationalists on the other side of public opinion, I have yet to see a Russian user who was satisfied with this turn of events. You just can't escape the connection to the big and therefore somewhat illegal money, the Russian government, and the foreign interests. Censorship and privacy concerns (for both personal and financial info) all stand.

It is clear though that the real target are not nationalists/skins and suchlike -- they are serving their purpose. It is an old Macchiavellian strategy: channel the anger and the coarse destructive energy of young people who otherwise have no perspectives in society, towards hating others of different skin color. This takes the the courrupted government itself off the target, and also takes care of the growing immigration and ethnic mafia problems. No, the real target are those who think further than that -- those who see into the game, or have potential to do so.

Add to it a curious synchronicity: The Russian Ministery of Internal Affairs sponsors a bill that aims for a total control of the Internet, to weed out terrorists and extremist organizations. The bill somehow turns up at the Duma( parliament) without any preliminary discussion and analysis, no one knew about its existence until today.

I will continue to monitor further developments.

It should be fun.