some links which may be of interest

[charmian]

A staff member responds to both the dissatisfaction over the cross-posting and the incidents with staff members behaving inappropriately:

http://news.livejournal.com/129945.html?thread=90277529#t90277529

Another staff member confirms the 50/50 stat, and explains the staff's reasoning behind the exemption for Cyrillic services:

http://news.livejournal.com/129945.html?thread=90331545#t90331545

Here's also an interesting post about web 2.0 and web 1.0
http://nikkiscarlet.dreamwidth.org/285367.html


I have to wonder, though, why then if LJ on the Cyrillic/Russian side is so like Wordpress, why they aren't using Wordpress anyway? Is it simply a legacy/intertia issue? It appears LJ's Russian traffic has increased, so it appears its readership is holding up.

Although it is said to be a fifty-fifty split, it certainly seems in many ways that SUP's attention is more directed to the Russian side; and who knows whether that is rational from their standpoint, because while it seems to be the case that the userbase is split 50-50, the revenue streams are far more relevant, and of course SUP is not going to publicize those, unless they were to go public. Anyhow, if you look at the relevant LJ comms on the Russian side, SUP is far more engaged with the Russian audience, although the Russian audience seems to be much less engaged with SUP. Anyway, I wonder if the English userbase of LJ will continue to shrink? If so, probably fewer resources will be applied to it.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Is WordPress available in Russian translation? I've always figured that LiveJournal's popularity was due to it being available in Russian, and not being hosted in Russia.

[charmian]

No idea about the quality of Russian resources, but they seem to be some:

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language#Russian_.E2.80.94_.D0.A0.D1.83.D1.81.D1.81.D0.BA.D0.B8.D0.B9_.28ru_RU.29

[zvi]

there's also network effects, at this point. Blogging in Russia got started on LiveJournal, so LiveJournal was where you went in Russia to get a blog. Now that that's been the case for years, that's what everyone does.