Simply Dumb

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.  The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is that a Russian online company that runs their own language version of the site has purchased this pioneering social networking community for an undisclosed sum.

Given Czar Putin’s increasing crackdown on freedom of speech and opposition political organization, I wonder how long it will take for the Russian government now to clamp down on anti-government bloggers on LiveJournal.  Months?  Weeks?  Days?

This is probably more alarmist than anything, but just in case it does happen… I told you so.

Update: ***In other news, foreign election monitors have declared that Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were unfair… Big surprise!***

The blogging software company Six Apart has sold its social networking site LiveJournal to Russia’s SUP.

SUP has been running the Russian language version of LiveJournal under licence since October 2006.

No details have been given of how much will be paid for LiveJournal, which was one of the first blogging communities.

In October, LiveJournal attracted 3.9 million visitors in the US compared with 72 million for MySpace and 32.9 million for Facebook.

SUP claims that the visitor data from Comscore Media Metrix underestimates LiveJournal’s audience.

LiveJournal was set up in 1999 by 19-year-old Brad Fitzpatrick.

Six Apart bought the site almost three years ago, although Mr Fitzpatrick continued to work on it until he left earlier this year to work for the search engine Google.

source Tags: dumb news, live journal, russia, vladamir putin, czar, freedom of speech

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