Russian search engine Yandex (who also keeps its own stats on different russian speaking blogs) published its own research/info on the boycott "Day Without Content" in cyrillic sector of LJ

http://company.yandex.ru/blog/message.xml?msg=102405

So here we go:

Number of cyrillic bloggers who posted in LJ on the last 5 Fridays:



These are numbers for each Friday from February 22nd till March 21.

And some info on people who did not write on March 21st:



20.27% - people who had the LJ account for over 3 years
18.79% - "from 3 to 1 year"
13.41% - "from 2 months to 1 year"
The numbers represent % of bloggers who did not post that day in their respective category. i.e. on march 21st 20.27% of russian speaking blogers who had LJ account for over 3 years weren't posting.

On average there was 15% drop in activity last Friday among russian-speaking LJ.



Is there any way to look up stats on the rest of LJ?

Since Nosik is denying he used terms like "idiot" and "blackmail", the audio of his interview has been provided.

If you are a Russian speaker, or you know someone who is a Russian speaker, can you please direct them here and ask them to translate/confirm what he has said?

The audio is here, it is 8MB. A big thanks to Luydmila Telen for making this available.

http://community.livejournal.com/lj_2008/3846.html

Highlights include:

"The announcement last Wednesday was a mistake in regards to Basic accounts, as the change was not clearly stated, it did not allow for you to provide feedback, and went into effect immediately. Many of you have pointed out that the decision worried you less than the way it was communicated. You should have been given a voice, and you were not; we didn’t follow our own rules, and we apologize.

At this point we are working on a solution to enable existing LiveJournal users to create new Basic accounts as so many of you have requested. Nothing has been decided yet, but we are considering options which would allow existing users to continue to create new Basic accounts."

ALSO, as pointed out by connie_chung:

"Subscriptions – Should moderators be able to charge for access to closed communities?"

Comments also reflect a general sense of displeasure at Mr. Nosik's comments and subsequent conduct; feel free to drop LJ a line regarding this and other matters.

Finally Mr. dolboeb came out with his own view on the whole basic account issue. And it is in english!

Here you go boys and gals: http://anton-nossik.livejournal.com/16069.html

The fabled policy update has finally arrived.

Highlights from the document include:

* The linked, legal definition of child pornography is given clearly stating that "This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults."

HOWEVER...

* We are given new headings such as "Inappropriate Content", which is defined only as "A user has posted content which incites, encourages, or advocates rape, pedophilia, or the abuse of children in any way." Given that the interests were once considered to be declarations of advocation, this needs further clarification as to what exactly constitutes "advocation". Taken as is should be, this heading is not a problem. But is fiction an advocation?

AND, THE BIG FINALE:

* Non-Photographic images of minors is declared as forbidden by LJ. Letting LJ speak for itself here:

"We are not making any determination on the legality of non-photographic images of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct. This is simply a type of content LiveJournal has decided not to host."

"LiveJournal attempts to grant users the ability to express themselves in as many ways as possible. In the case of this content, however, LiveJournal has chosen not to host it due to its highly controversial nature."

On one hand, it is something to see that they have come to understand the legal stance on the issue. On the other, it can be easily seen that this will not be taken well. One point brought up was... how exactly do you identify the age of a drawn character? Do you take the artist's word for it? Is there some other criteria? How will this be determined?

marta has noted that this is a document in progress: if we do not want this to be the final result, we have to act NOW.

Tell LJ what you think of the new document.

Some of the Advisory Board members were announced last night.

I am mostly just sitting back and watching with an open mind toward the board, but a cynical attitude toward Lj. What do you guys think?


Edited at 1:35 am:
Has anyone else noticed the new Lj home page? There's an Inside LiveJournal section with links to Explore sections as well as MSN articles. I didn't see anything in the many official Lj communities about it. Does anyone know anything about this?

( @ imaria: I didn't know how you wanted this tagged after the edit, so I just wanted to make sure you knew I edited so you could tag it properly. (: )

Here is an chat with SUP's president, Andrew Paulson, which occurred last December.

Many of the questions are about business or other topics, but some relate to LJ. I'll cut and post some remarks he made that do have to do with LJ.

( more here )

i just wanted to bring this back to the surface; it sort of got buried with everything else that has been going on. i am still planning on addressing a letter to the Lj advisory board, as discussed in the post the above comment is from. i just wanted to let everyone know that

as long as everyone is in agreement about addressing the letter to the entire board, then i think that is the best thing to do. i just don't feel that we are ready to present our case to such a large group of people. we have only managed to get the attention of a few staff members, and should not make any great jumps. i also strongly believe that we should not be divided on any decisions we make, so since the majority of us want to address the letter to the entire Lj advisory board that is what we should do. (please let me know if you disagree!)

the fact is, this entire matter is business and personal. when you mix the two, it can be very difficult to maintain clear lines; the emotions of everyone involved can run all over the place.

if we are going to write an open letter addressed to the entire advisory board, we need a little more time. we need to wait and see how this next code release goes. it can go either way: it can mean that they are starting to listen to us and our needs, or that they are just going to keep doing the minimum amount of damage control necessary in order to keep us quiet. i for one will not keep quiet.

in short, before we write any open letters, we need to:

• agree that we are writing the letter to the entire board


• wait a little longer to see how the interest search solution works out


• figure out exactly what we want from them; we've already begun to do so in this thread so far. we just need to keep coming up with things, in a problem-solution manner.


• agree on problems-solutions to present in our letter

if there is anything you feel we should do before writing the letter, let me know. if there is something i missed or overlooked, please let me know. you all have been very helpful in getting this together. (:

i am still open to any suggestions--as well as ideas--regarding the open letter we've discussed. i just wanted to make sure that this is still one of our tasks. (:

Hey guys, I'm new here. Thanks foxfirefey  for telling me about this community. Also glad to see so many familiar nick-names here.

Back to the topic.... Yesterday nura announced that SUP is selling permanent accounts to "all russian speaking lj-users" through Dec. 31st. Traditionally the sale of permanent accounts was a big thing for LJ. There were only three sales in the 8 years history of LJ. So it is an occasion. Sometimes even charitable - like with the latest sale in June of this year. I wouldn't be writing this post if SUP did something special for SUP enabled users. However it is the same $150 and you get all the same functions.

So my questions are:

1) Why did they limit it only to SUP enabled users? This is so biased against all the other users. This makes as much sense as if 6A did a sale only for lj-users with zip codes in San Francisco.

2) To some extent my personal rant  - SUP rep. said that the sale open for "all russian speaking users" but it's not. It is open only for SUP-enabled users. Not all russian speaking users are in SUP and not all SUP users speak russian. Such ugly misrepresentation.

I guess.....discuss?!