Have you started to learn Russian?
I was recently asked by several people why LiveJournal started to show more Russian advertisement. LiveJournal is a very popular blogging community that was created in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick and became fairly popular around the world. LiveJournal differs from other traditional blogs as it is a virtual community that in fact predated MySpace and Facebook. The community is known in many countries under its abbreviation LJ and its modifications in different languages. For example ЖЖ (Zheh Zheh) as it is known in Russia. It is literal translation of LJ into Russian.
LiveJournal gained a lot of popularity and first was purchased by the company Six Apart that managed it till December of 2007. And on December 2, 2007 Six Apart announced that it is selling LJ to Russian company SUP.
SUP is a new Russian multimedia magnate that is developing online multimedia application and services in Russian Federation. Many questions have risen since then. The biggest concern that bloggers have, especially in the countries of former Soviet Union is censorship. And even though SUP claimed that no censorship practices are going to take place, people are slightly worried since SUP is a pro government organization.
Unfortunately many people will be less inclined to express certain thoughts and post some controversial materials. At least for a while, since it has been only 3 month since the purchase and users did not have a lot of feedback from the SUP.
This was such an informative post! But alas no, I am not learning Russian… I think I need to master Japanese and Chinese first.