More On Russian LJ
Friday, November 6th, 2009 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianSo, someone said that they were interested in hearing about Russian Livejournal (or Cyrillic, given that there are other languages other than Russian which are covered? I'm not sure how SUP provides extra services to them? Since I wasn't able to find this out, I will be talking only about the Russian language portion of LJ.) Anyway, I don't speak Russian AT ALL. All of this is based on machine translation.
If you switch to Cyrillic Services, the main difference you'll see is that the site scheme is changed to Lanzelot. I'm not sure why this hasn't become the site scheme for English LJ as well. Perhaps it is because of the "feature conservatism" of the English speaking userbase? The only think I personally dislike about Lanzelot is that the bar at the top is larger than Horizon's. The other reason could be that Lanzelot incorporates features which English speaking LJ doesn't have. Most notably, statistics and LJ.ru, which is what the "Main" heading links to.
Here's the header in Lanzelot, and here is the navbar in Cyrillic services. See how Yandex search is front and center. I wonder if in English LJ they'll be redesigning the site scheme and navbar to make search more prominent. If so, how will this alter how people use the site? It will certainly make it easier to find pertinent posts.
Also on the main page are ratings, both of individual posts and of top users and communities. These may also be found on LJ.ru, so I'll talk about them in that part.
LJ.ru seems to be some kind of portal site created by SUP. On the front page, there are various popular posts, polls, popular tags, etc.
The second heading either translates to scenes or themes: It seems to be a day by day listing of popular topics/posts. These are, according to the about section, the most popular posts/topics on LJ, and they are introduced and chosen by LJ.ru staff. For example, here you have a post about airplanes with some comments quoted, and even a section where you can add your own comments on the lj.ru site. There also is tagging within Lj.ru, so it seems they have a database of popular posts; for example, here's the "livejournal" tag.
The third section is photos. Not sure how they choose the photos.
The next section is celebrities. There's a directory of confirmed celebrities on Russian LJ. A FAQ explains that they only include real LJs by celebs. They verify by calling them on the phone and asking.
Then, ratings. These seem to be statistical, but I'm not sure how it's done. You've got popular posts (various metrics available, including hits and 'diggs'), popular comms, popular interests and popular users. The most popular users seem to have around 40,000 users friending them.
After that, there's a comm directory. To add your comm you need at least a hundred members and at least one update a week. You can also add tags to describe your comm, as well as adding it to a category.
Then, there's a section of material popular among the women users Apparently this is unmoderated and automatically generated.
The last tab seems to be about a children's charity SUP is supporting
Now, if you want to see your own stats and are a Cyrillic user logged into LJ.ru, you can go to the counter page to see your statistics.
These screencaps are filtered through Google's translation bot.
I think what Google means by 'magazine' is the journal itself. 'Buddylist-tape' I suppose is what google thinks friendslist is.
Google-translated explanation of the above chart.
The comments section: I think by 'abandoned' Google means 'left.'
The other sections (which I didn't take screencaps of because they are empty on my test account) are something that looks like a history of friends (not sure your friends, or friends-of), "my guests" (last 100 named users who participate in the program who visit your journal), and what I think may be post by post hits stats. Disappointingly, there don't seem to be referrers.
LJ.ru also has a page about itself.
And, there's a page for potential advertisers. This is interesting because there are some metrics on Russian LJ usage. The site claims that there are 1,409,551 registered accounts, 46,973 accounts registered in the last month, and every month, 12 million hits (I think). There are also charts of what country Cyrillic LJ users are from, what cities they are from, what gender they are (51% of those who filled this out said male, 49% female), and age. They do geographical and demographic targeting for ads, and prices vary according to month. (I think)
Here are some RU-specific official(?) comms I found:
Ru-news: the Russian language news comm. Bears some similarity to English language LJ news, especially now.
lj-ru-support: The English language support comm is more like a noticeboard for support volunteers. The Russian version also seems to function as a suggestions/feedback/lj_releases comm. They seem to do polls every Wednesday about what kind of features users would like, LJ usage, etc.
Some kind of announcements comm, where they seem to often give away movie tickets and such to people who comment or answer quiz questions correctly. (They say stuff like 'first 60 people who comment get two tickets to such and such movie')
Anyway, if anyone who speaks Russian or is better informed than me notices any errors or misrepresentations, please feel free to write in with corrections.
It seems clear even to my underinformed eyes that SUP has poured quite a few resources into the Russian side of LJ: it must take a lot of staff time and development to have created and maintain LJ.ru, and to have made the statistics function.
If you switch to Cyrillic Services, the main difference you'll see is that the site scheme is changed to Lanzelot. I'm not sure why this hasn't become the site scheme for English LJ as well. Perhaps it is because of the "feature conservatism" of the English speaking userbase? The only think I personally dislike about Lanzelot is that the bar at the top is larger than Horizon's. The other reason could be that Lanzelot incorporates features which English speaking LJ doesn't have. Most notably, statistics and LJ.ru, which is what the "Main" heading links to.
Here's the header in Lanzelot, and here is the navbar in Cyrillic services. See how Yandex search is front and center. I wonder if in English LJ they'll be redesigning the site scheme and navbar to make search more prominent. If so, how will this alter how people use the site? It will certainly make it easier to find pertinent posts.
Also on the main page are ratings, both of individual posts and of top users and communities. These may also be found on LJ.ru, so I'll talk about them in that part.
LJ.ru seems to be some kind of portal site created by SUP. On the front page, there are various popular posts, polls, popular tags, etc.
The second heading either translates to scenes or themes: It seems to be a day by day listing of popular topics/posts. These are, according to the about section, the most popular posts/topics on LJ, and they are introduced and chosen by LJ.ru staff. For example, here you have a post about airplanes with some comments quoted, and even a section where you can add your own comments on the lj.ru site. There also is tagging within Lj.ru, so it seems they have a database of popular posts; for example, here's the "livejournal" tag.
The third section is photos. Not sure how they choose the photos.
The next section is celebrities. There's a directory of confirmed celebrities on Russian LJ. A FAQ explains that they only include real LJs by celebs. They verify by calling them on the phone and asking.
Then, ratings. These seem to be statistical, but I'm not sure how it's done. You've got popular posts (various metrics available, including hits and 'diggs'), popular comms, popular interests and popular users. The most popular users seem to have around 40,000 users friending them.
After that, there's a comm directory. To add your comm you need at least a hundred members and at least one update a week. You can also add tags to describe your comm, as well as adding it to a category.
Then, there's a section of material popular among the women users Apparently this is unmoderated and automatically generated.
The last tab seems to be about a children's charity SUP is supporting
Now, if you want to see your own stats and are a Cyrillic user logged into LJ.ru, you can go to the counter page to see your statistics.
These screencaps are filtered through Google's translation bot.
I think what Google means by 'magazine' is the journal itself. 'Buddylist-tape' I suppose is what google thinks friendslist is.
Google-translated explanation of the above chart.
The comments section: I think by 'abandoned' Google means 'left.'
The other sections (which I didn't take screencaps of because they are empty on my test account) are something that looks like a history of friends (not sure your friends, or friends-of), "my guests" (last 100 named users who participate in the program who visit your journal), and what I think may be post by post hits stats. Disappointingly, there don't seem to be referrers.
LJ.ru also has a page about itself.
And, there's a page for potential advertisers. This is interesting because there are some metrics on Russian LJ usage. The site claims that there are 1,409,551 registered accounts, 46,973 accounts registered in the last month, and every month, 12 million hits (I think). There are also charts of what country Cyrillic LJ users are from, what cities they are from, what gender they are (51% of those who filled this out said male, 49% female), and age. They do geographical and demographic targeting for ads, and prices vary according to month. (I think)
Here are some RU-specific official(?) comms I found:
Ru-news: the Russian language news comm. Bears some similarity to English language LJ news, especially now.
lj-ru-support: The English language support comm is more like a noticeboard for support volunteers. The Russian version also seems to function as a suggestions/feedback/lj_releases comm. They seem to do polls every Wednesday about what kind of features users would like, LJ usage, etc.
Some kind of announcements comm, where they seem to often give away movie tickets and such to people who comment or answer quiz questions correctly. (They say stuff like 'first 60 people who comment get two tickets to such and such movie')
Anyway, if anyone who speaks Russian or is better informed than me notices any errors or misrepresentations, please feel free to write in with corrections.
It seems clear even to my underinformed eyes that SUP has poured quite a few resources into the Russian side of LJ: it must take a lot of staff time and development to have created and maintain LJ.ru, and to have made the statistics function.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-07 05:33 am (UTC)I don't know if the stats page is English-stripped (in this case, Russian-stripped?) yet so it can be translated; try the "?uselang=en_LJ" argument on pages to see if they are. (?uselang=debug is even more fun.)
Russian-language suggestions are pointed to lj_ru_support.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-07 06:38 am (UTC)On the counter page, nothing happens when I try adding the ?uselang thing. I think might be because it's hosted on livejournal.ru and not livejournal.com?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-07 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-08 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-08 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-07 05:58 pm (UTC)Another curious translation you may come across in connection with LiveJournal is that syndication is called "translation", so you'll hear about "translated accounts" etc.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-07 08:13 pm (UTC)