Misplaced Pages

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54-467: Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007; the service continued to operate out of the U.S. via a California-based subsidiary, LiveJournal, Inc., but began moving some operations to Russian offices in 2009. In December 2016, the service relocated its servers to Russia, and in April 2017, LiveJournal changed its terms of service to conform to Russian law . As with other social networks,

108-651: A genericized trademark for blogging in Russia, and the community boasts approximately 700,000 Russian LiveJournals, with 300,000 of them being active. Six Apart licensed the LiveJournal brand to the Russian company SUP Media in August 2006. The deal was brokered with Fitzpatrick's assistance, but expatriated Russians have expressed concerns, citing links between the company and state security. Some have also worried that SUP's purchase of

162-684: A message board -style thread of comments – each comment can be replied to individually, starting a new thread. All users, including non-paying users, can set various options for comments: they can instruct the software to only accept comments from those on their friends list or block anonymous comments (meaning only LiveJournal users can comment on their posts). They can also screen various types of comments before they are displayed, or disable commenting entirely. Users can also have replies sent directly to their registered e-mail address. In addition, LiveJournal acts as host to group journals, dubbed "communities" (frequently abbreviated as comms ). Anyone who joins

216-520: A community can make posts to it as they would on a regular journal; communities also have "maintainers", ordinary users who run the community and oversee membership and moderation. LiveJournal community is a collective blog in which different users can post messages. Users who are interested in a particular subject can find or create a community for this subject. All the users of the communities are divided into: Some areas of LiveJournal rely heavily on user contributions and volunteer efforts. In particular,

270-436: A given entry may be allowed from anyone who can read the entry or restricted. Commenting may be restricted by disabling commenting altogether or by screening comments. Screened comments are visible only to the original posters until the journal owner approves the comment. These restrictions can be applied to just anonymous users, users who aren't listed as a friend, or everyone. The IP address of commenters can be logged as well if

324-873: A large class of users are on LiveJournal only to harm it and its owners; "their goal is to criticize, destabilize and ruin our reputation." Nosik said his likely reaction to such pressure would be to retaliate against the users rather than bowing to their pressure. Despite stating that LiveJournal would maintain the majority of its operations in the United States via the local subsidiary LiveJournal, Inc., in January 2009 SUP laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia. In December 2016, LiveJournal moved to servers hosted in Russia; in April 2017, it changed its terms of service to conform to Russian law and to be written (in their official form) only in Russian. From September 2, 2001, until December 12, 2003,

378-510: A policy document used by the Abuse Prevention Team was leaked to a group of its critics before it was due to be released. The policy document has since been officially released. Another controversy arose when users complained after an unknown number of users were asked to remove default user pictures containing images of breast feeding that were considered inappropriate as they contained a view of nipples or areolae. The incident attracted

432-438: A post that only the poster can read, thus making their LiveJournal a private diary rather than a blog. It is also possible to choose a default security setting for one's journal, so that all entries are posted at that security level by default even if one forgets to alter the security setting at the time of posting. Users may restrict who can comment on their posts in addition to who has the ability to read their posts. Comments on

486-454: A separate option, like the "friend of" list, and reworded so that the lists would have to be selected to include them in a profile, rather than to select an option to remove them. LiveJournal lists that users can hide communities from their profile page by not friending them (friended communities are "watched") and by either banning the community from posting in their journal (which has no effect since they cannot anyway, but does remove them from

540-438: A significant minority stake in the business. SUP is split into two business divisions, one is SUP Media, which includes Gazeta.ru (a popular online news site); Championat.com (an online sports site); and LiveJournal.com (a widely used blogging platform). The other business line is SUP Advertising, which includes +SOL (an online sales house which sells SUP's inventory, Russian media sites and foreign media sites including Yahoo,

594-406: A single post explaining that the journal is friends-only). Still, such features as tags and userpics cannot be hidden. LiveJournal also allows users to create custom user groups within their group of friends to further restrict who can read any particular post, and to allow reading of subsets of a user's friends list. LiveJournal additionally has a "private" security option which allows users to make

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648-427: A user's friends to read protected entries and causes the friends' entries to appear on the user's "friends page". Friends can also be grouped together in "friends groups", allowing for more complex behavior. As of 2014, LiveJournal in the United States had 10 million monthly uniques, 30 million monthly visitors, and 170 million pageviews. As with most weblogs, people can comment on each other's journal entries and create

702-481: A week of downtime for the community, while LiveJournal worked to fix the issue. In April 2010, the Oh No They Didn't community was moved to its own database cluster to improve site performance for all users, due to its size and the amount of traffic it was receiving. LiveJournal's parent company, Danga Interactive, was formed and held entirely by Brad Fitzpatrick. He sold the company to Six Apart in 2005. Rumors of

756-440: A wide variety of public figures use the service, as do political pundits , who use it for political commentary , particularly in Russia, where it partners with the online newspaper Gazeta.ru . The unit of social networking on LiveJournal is quaternary (with four possible states of connection between one user and another). Two users can have no relationship, they can list each other as friends mutually, or either can "friend"

810-540: Is also more or less applicable to most post-Soviet states, who use the Runet and are forming a common lingua franca community like English on the Internet . Many officials of the Russian government actively use this term as a synonym for Internet in the territory of Russia , i.e. for Internet infrastructure, which is subject to Russian law (including Russian censorship laws , copyright, corporate, advertisement laws, etc.), but

864-524: Is sometimes a source of conflict, hurt feelings, and other misunderstandings. LiveJournal friendships are not necessarily mutual; any user can befriend or "defriend" any other user at any time. In the Russian LiveJournal community, the word френд ("friend", an English borrowing) is often used to describe this relationship instead of the native Russian word "друг" ([ drug ]) that translates to "friend". The Dreamwidth code fork of LiveJournal has split

918-408: Is the most popular community on LiveJournal, with over 100,000 members. The community's primary interest is celebrity gossip, and most of its posts are taken and sourced from other gossip blogs. At the end of January 2009, Oh No They Didn't! was the first LiveJournal to surpass 16,777,216 comments (2), effectively breaking LiveJournal's previously undocumented limit on comments. This resulted in almost

972-759: Is used on 89.8% of .ru sites and on 88.7% of the former Soviet Union domain, .su. Russian is the most used language of websites of several countries that were part of the former Soviet Union: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan , and 81.8% in Tajikistan. As of 2013, the 59.7 million Russian-speaking Internet users, represented 3% of global Internet users. In April 2012, Russia

1026-512: The Bazaar , to boost volunteer performance by offering money in return for "wanted" enhancements or improvements. The Bazaar was intended to follow a regular monthly pay-out scheme, but it ended up paying out only once, after which it was neglected by the management, and shut down one year later. Nowadays, voluntary contributions to the software are considered for inclusion less and less as the company has acquired more and more paid employees who focus on

1080-621: The Internet that uses the Russian language , including the Russian-language community on the Internet and websites. Geographically, it reaches all continents, including Antarctica (Russian scientists on Bellingshausen Station ), but mostly it is based in Russia . The term Runet is a portmanteau of ru (code for both the Russian language and Russia 's top-level domain ) and net/network. The term

1134-596: The "member of" list) or by removing the "friend of" list, which removes the "member of" list in addition to the "friend of" list. LiveJournal allows paid account users to change privacy settings on past entries in bulk. Basic and plus accounts do not have an official web-based method, and normally must manually change such settings one by one; some third party clients, such as Livejournal Visibility Changer, provide this functionality for non-paid users. Communities can also be private, with moderated or closed membership, when community holders give users different level of access to

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1188-522: The 'friend' concept into its two component pieces of subscription and access. As LiveJournal has grown, it has had to deal with issues involving the content it hosts. Like most web logging hosts, it has adopted a basic Terms of Service . The Terms of Service simultaneously expresses a desire for free speech by the users while outlining impermissible conduct such as spamming , copyright violation, and harassment . LiveJournal created an Abuse Prevention Team and processes to handle claims about violations of

1242-454: The BBC, Last.fm and a number of newspaper sites) and Victory SA, a digital marketing agency. In 2013, SUP was merged with Rambler . SUP corporate SUP media SUP advertising This Russian corporation or company article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Runet The Russian Internet (Russian: русский Интернет ) or Runet ( Russian : Рунет ), is the part of

1296-519: The Goat appreciates your call." This occurs randomly. A weekly comic about Frank, written and drawn by cartoonist Ryan Estrada , was updated every Thursday on the "Frank: The Comic Strip" community on LiveJournal. As of July 2009 the community had roughly 8,000 members, and was watched by more than 7,000 LiveJournal users. Beginning at the end of January 2010, LiveJournal's weekly news posts included references to Frank's life, becoming works of short fiction at

1350-480: The LiveJournal Support area is run almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Similarly, the website is translated into other languages by volunteers, although this effort is running down due to a perceived lack of involvement from the LiveJournal administration. The development of the LiveJournal software has seen extensive volunteer involvement in the past. In February and March 2003, there was an effort, nicknamed

1404-483: The LiveJournal ad guidelines. LiveJournal responded by removing the advertisement from the website and issuing an apology to its users. SUP Media SUP (Russian: СУП , which means 'soup') is an international online media company, founded in Moscow in mid-2006 by Andrew Paulson and Alexander Mamut . Its ownership is split between Mamut, Kommersant Publishing House and management. SUP's first major announcement

1458-460: The Russian online community doesn't support this use of the term as millions of users use the Russian language on the Internet while living outside Russia; Russian is spoken in large parts of eastern Europe that do not fall under Russian territory. Some Russian officials automatically believe that the Russian Misplaced Pages is based in Russia as a business entity and try to control the content of

1512-457: The Terms of Service, violations of copyright, violations of the law , and other issues. There is an ability for a user to report an entry as "spam", and it is a user's responsibility to separate spamming and bot activity from actual violations while reporting. If the Abuse Prevention Team determines that a violation has occurred, the user will be either required to remove the infringing material (as in

1566-556: The age of 18. At the same time the user itself can set own preferences in viewing adult content settings in order not to receive such materials. All users are defaulted to Moderate Filtering in the Safe Search Filter , but can change this option. It is written in the LiveJournal rules that if the content is reported as being offensive or inappropriate, LiveJournal has the right to flag, restrict access, or delete it at any time without notice. Oh No They Didn't , also known as ONTD,

1620-465: The attention of breast feeding advocacy groups such as Pro-Mom who publicized the issue to gain larger media awareness. LiveJournal responded by changing the FAQ on appropriate content for default user pictures. The current FAQ 111 says that nudity is not appropriate in default user pictures; the original FAQ 111 said that graphic sexual content was not appropriate. Breastfeeding pictures were not restricted by

1674-473: The case of copyright violations); the journal will be suspended until such time as the material can be removed (e.g., posting of home addresses or other various contact information of another); or, in cases of severe or multiple violations, the journal will be suspended (e.g., account hijacking, multiple instances of copyright violation, child pornography). The offending user is notified by email of any journal suspension or, if any offending material must be removed,

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1728-554: The community was less to make a profit and more to curtail or even dissolve the strong independent Russian blogging community, silencing dissent the government found inconvenient. These concerns started with the licensing deal, and have grown with the announcement of LiveJournal's sale to SUP Media in December 2007. In a March 2008 interview, Anton Nosik , an advisor to SUP Media, accused LiveJournal users of "trying to scare and blackmail us, threatening to destroy our business," and said that

1782-494: The content, based on the information about the user. While LiveJournal permits adult-oriented content, it is a user's responsibility to mark content as inappropriate for minors. There are two types of adult content: Labeling as adult material does not convey in any way that this content is considered obscene, in the legal definition of the term. Such content should be marked in order to be shown only to users whose birth dates on their user information page indicate that they are over

1836-434: The end of February. These pieces are often tied to weekly virtual gift promotions, where commenters that meet a certain criterion will receive a free v-gift sent by Frank. LiveJournal provides an option intended to reduce the chances of search engines indexing a journal; however, the only way to make it completely impossible for such indexing to occur is to set the entry security to "friends only" or higher when first posting

1890-443: The entry. If an entry is first posted publicly, and then edited to reflect a higher security level, it may have already been indexed by a search engine in the time between the security edit. The popular "friends only" security option, which has since been adopted by Xanga and Myspace , hides a post from the general public so that only those on the user's friends list can read it. Some users keep all their posts friends-only (except for

1944-422: The growth of LiveJournal was checked by an "invite code" system . This curbing of membership was necessitated by a rate of growth faster than the server architecture could handle. New users were required to either obtain an invite code from an existing user or buy a paid account (which reverted to a free account at the expiration of the period of time paid for). The invite code system serendipitously reduced abuse on

1998-567: The impending sale were first reported by Business 2.0 journalist Om Malik in January, 2005. Fitzpatrick confirmed the sale, and insisted the site's core principles would not be discarded by the new ownership. In August 2007, Fitzpatrick left to work for Google . He continued to serve on the advisory board of LiveJournal, Inc until it was retired in June 2010. LiveJournal became extremely popular in Russia. The Russian translation of LiveJournal – ЖЖ ( ZheZhe , which stands for Живой Журнал) – has become

2052-418: The journal owner wishes to enable it. An option allows users to hide their "friend of" list from public view, but leaves the list visible to the user. In this case, only the friends list is shown. When "friend of" is allowed, journal accounts who have friended the user and who are also friended are listed in neither "friend of" nor 'friend", but rather a third category, "mutual friends". This was eventually made

2106-470: The majority were in the 17–25 age group, with an exceptionally large group of 32-year-olds. Among the users specifying their gender in their profile, 45% of those accounts identified as male, and 55% as female. One fifth, or 20%, of accounts did not specify a gender. LiveJournal is most popular in English-speaking countries (although there is a language selection feature), and the United States has by far

2160-583: The most LiveJournal users among users who choose to list a location. There is also a sizable Russian contingent. LiveJournal is the largest online community on the Runet , with about 45% of all entries in the Russian blogosphere. Frank the Goat is LiveJournal's mascot . During the early years of the site, Frank was treated like an actual living being by much of the LiveJournal userbase, and his brief "biography" as well as his "journal" reflect this. Sometimes, callers to LiveJournal's Voice Post service are informed "Frank

2214-532: The organization's commercial interests. This has led to the formation of several forks , many of which introduce new features that users would like to see, especially features that are brought up repeatedly in LiveJournal's own suggestions journal. In some cases legal and administrative concerns have led LiveJournal to prohibit some people from volunteering. As of November 2012, 39,663,771 accounts exist on LiveJournal, with 1,790,795 listed as "active in some way." Of those users who provided their date of birth,

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2268-431: The original FAQ, and the current FAQ reflects the fact that they are only restricted from use as a default user picture. Breastfeeding pictures are still allowed as user pictures that may be manually chosen while posting but may not be the default. In January 2006 the site had to make emergency changes to the way the site hosts user accounts due to a web browser -side security vulnerability . The hacker group responsible

2322-499: The other without reciprocation. The term "friend" on LiveJournal is mostly a technical term, but because it is emotionally loaded for many people, there have been discussions in such LiveJournal communities as lj_dev and lj_biz as well as suggestions about whether the term should be used this way. A user's list of friends ( friends list , often shortened to flist ) will often include several communities and RSS feeds in addition to individual users. Generally, " friending " allows

2376-545: The site by deterring people from creating multiple throw-away accounts. The invite code system was lifted after a number of major improvements to the overall site architecture. Elimination of the invite code system was met with mixed feelings and some opposition. LiveJournal's management pointed out that the invite code system had always been intended to be temporary. The dual usage of "friends" as those whose journals one reads, and those one trusts to read one's own journal, has been criticized for being at odds with everyday use of

2430-476: The site would, "Stay advertisement free." The Social Contract went on to say, "It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages." Another ad-related controversy occurred in June 2006, when ads for Kpremium began installing malware and triggering pop-up ads on Australian and Western European users' computers, against

2484-422: The term Runet means that the content of websites is available for Russian users without foreign language skills, or that online shops have an office in Russia (for example, Russian search engines, e-mail services, anti-viruses, dictionaries, Russian-language websites occupying niches similar to those of Facebook , Amazon , YouTube , eBay , PayPal , Foursquare , etc. for usage in all post-Soviet states ), so

2538-801: The term is related to practical usage for end users. Being on the Runet gives a company some advantage, as many local IT-companies are more successful than foreign services on the Russian market. The term can describe the situation of the 1990s to the early 2000s; foreign companies didn't want to operate in the Russian market and localize their products, so Russia-based start-ups were more attractive to Russian speaking users. Nowadays, some Russian users are not interested in usage of such services as Facebook or Google Maps because local services have more Russia-specific features and local community ( VK.com , Yandex services, etc.), though many international websites have very high quality Russian localization and Google search has had full support of Russian morphology. This

2592-448: The term. The individual users on a user's friends list may contain a mixture of people met through real world friendships, online friendships and general interests, as well as courtesy friendships where a user has " friended " someone who friended them. A friends list may represent something entirely unrelated to social relationships, such as a reading list, a collection or a puzzle. The difference between online and real-world friendships

2646-465: The user is given a deadline for its removal. When a journal is suspended, it effectively removes from sight everything the user has written on LiveJournal, including comments in other people's journals; however, the user is able to download the material while suspended. Those suspended users who have paid for LiveJournal's service do not have payments refunded. A small controversy arose in November 2004 when

2700-471: The website or establish a Russia-based clone of Misplaced Pages . According to reports conducted by Yandex , Russian is the primary language of 91% of Russian websites (in Yandex's list). In the autumn of 2009, Runet contained about 15 million sites (estimated to be about 6.5% of the entire Internet). Domains with a high proportion of the Russian language include .su , .ru , .рф , .ua , .by , .kz . Russian

2754-461: Was a licensing agreement with Six Apart that gave SUP rights to use the LiveJournal brand, as well as operate portions of the LiveJournal service for LiveJournal's Russian users. SUP subsequently purchased LiveJournal outright from its previous owners, Six Apart. Since its launch SUP has grown through acquisition and organically. In June 2008 Kommersant , a leading Russian media company, acquired

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2808-490: Was coined in 1997 by Israel-resident, Azerbaijani blogger Raffi Aslanbekov ( Russian : Раффи Асланбеков ), known as "Great Uncle" in Russia, on his Russian-language column Great Uncle's Thoughts . The term was popularized by early Internet users and was included in several dictionaries, including the spelling dictionary of the Russian Academy of Sciences , edited by V. V. Lopatin, as soon as in 2001. For ordinary users,

2862-483: Was later identified as "Bantown". Approximately 900,000 accounts were at risk. In April 2006, LiveJournal announced it was introducing a new user type that gave free users some of the features available to paid members in exchange for ad sponsorship. This user type was initially called Sponsored+, but was later renamed to Plus. This announcement was met with a whirlwind of controversy. Between April 2004 and January 2005, one of LiveJournal's Social Contract promises stated

2916-504: Was ranked 9th in the world for number of users and 4th (with 4.8%) for number of Russian-language content. In September 2011, Russia surpassed Germany as the biggest Internet market in Europe, with 50.8 million users. In March 2013, it was announced that Russian is the second most used language on the web. Historically the term Runet has been described in several ways. Harvard University 's Berkman Center conducts regular researches of

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