Internet & Democracy Blog

Let your Russian friends and colleagues know that we’ve just released the full Russian translation of our paper (pdf), “Public Discourse in the Russian Blogosphere: Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization.” Accompanying the release is a very nice summary and additional commentary on the role of blogs in Russia by project team members Gregory Asmolov and Karina Alexanyan that is available on Ivan Zassoursky’s excellent Web site Chastnyi Korrespondent (which our research shows is a top outlink for Russian bloggers). Gregory and Karina have some new analysis and additional blog maps not found in the original paper, so if you read Russian it is well worth checking out. We are turning our focus next to Twitter in Russia and have nearly completed an update crawl of Russian tweets, John Kelly has created an alpha Twitter map, and we hope to release a working paper in the spring. The Russian version of Media Cloud is also up and running and we hope to begin blogging some of our early finding from that tool in the next couple weeks, so check back here often for additional research on the role of the Internet in Russia.