Internet & Democracy Blog

Looks like President Medvedev has decided the Kremlin.ru site just wasn’t pulling in the kind of traffic he expected to his blog. So today he starting a new blog on the popular LiveJournal blogging platform, which is a sort of social network/blogging hybrid. LiveJournal hosts a number of the most popular blogs in Russia including Rustem Adagamov and Anton Nossik (who just happens to help run SUP–see below). The NY Times even has a Russian language blog, which occasionally translates and invites comments on Russia-related articles that appear in the English version of the Times. You can also follow the (actually contested) Sochi mayoral race through opposition candidate Boris Nemtsov’s campaign blog.

There was quite a dust up in the Russian blogosphere when LiveJournal was bought by SUP media, which also owns one of the most popular online newspapers in Russia, gazeta.ru, among other media holdings. SUP owner Alexander Mamut is seen as a Kremlin loyalist, which understandably concerned many Russian bloggers since SUP, it was thought, would have a different approach to privacy issues. Still, according to a 2007 Yandex study (pdf), LiveJournal remains the leading blog hosting service for ‘active’ Russian language blogs, although liveinternet.ru and mail.ru have had stronger growth.

Medvedev will apparently continue his video blog format. His first post includes reaction and further discussion of his widely publicized interview with Novaya Gazeta, which I wrote about last week, including the development of democracy and civil society in Russia. Comments on the new blog will remain moderated–so no swearing at the president, please. An example of one of the first comments on the new blog: “Democracy doesn’t need the hungry, democracy needs the starving.”

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