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heidiFirst, before the serious stuff, Happy St Patrick's Day to all who celebrate and/or enjoy it.
Second, gacked from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
supernatural_tv, Circuit City has Supernatural DVD sets for seasons 1 and 2 for $19.99 each. Cheap! Share the love!
Third, there's a plan afoot to match Terry Pratchett's 500,000 pound donation to Alzheimer's research. (If you're in the US and want to give in dollars using paypal, click here.)
Now, the time-sensitive issue of the day - in a follow-up to LJ's dropping of Basic Personal Accounts, LJ has also removed various Interests from the Popular Interests list includng "bisexuality", "fanfction", "fandom", "boys", "girls", "depression" and "faeries".
Yep, "fandom" no longer exists as a popular interest on LJ.
W?T?F?
What sort of warped business decision led them to think that "fandom" was some sort of danger to the LJ community such that newcomers and interested outsiders and registered users couldn't know that it was popular as an interest 'round these parts?
If you're interested, there's going to be a strike this coming Friday here on LJ. Keep reading for more info.
ONE DAY CONTENT STRIKE
For one day, Friday, March 21, make no posts. Make no comments. Let there be NO new content added to LJ.
SUP obviously does not realize that Basic users have given something of value to them, that it is content that drives the site.
So, for one 24-hour period, from midnight GMT to midnight GMT, let's see how many people we can get to pledge to contribute NO CONTENT.
This will create a permanent downward spike in the daily-posts statistics, a permanent reminder of the power of the userbase.
Full information at The Fox's Den.
SPREAD THE WORD!
ETA at 3:50 PM - the interests seem to be back on the list - I wonder if the griping and threat about Make No Content Friday made a difference. I'm still taking Friday off from content-generation, and also from generating page views on LJ, because if you're here and logged in and doing something like reorganizing your tags or userpics, you're creating page-views, even if you're not making content. Instead, I'm going to spend an hour or so with a list of the RSS feeds I currently read on LJ, and import all of them to GoogleReader. Good to have another option, at least.
Second, gacked from
supernatural_tv, Circuit City has Supernatural DVD sets for seasons 1 and 2 for $19.99 each. Cheap! Share the love!Third, there's a plan afoot to match Terry Pratchett's 500,000 pound donation to Alzheimer's research. (If you're in the US and want to give in dollars using paypal, click here.)
Now, the time-sensitive issue of the day - in a follow-up to LJ's dropping of Basic Personal Accounts, LJ has also removed various Interests from the Popular Interests list includng "bisexuality", "fanfction", "fandom", "boys", "girls", "depression" and "faeries".
Yep, "fandom" no longer exists as a popular interest on LJ.
W?T?F?
What sort of warped business decision led them to think that "fandom" was some sort of danger to the LJ community such that newcomers and interested outsiders and registered users couldn't know that it was popular as an interest 'round these parts?
If you're interested, there's going to be a strike this coming Friday here on LJ. Keep reading for more info.
For one day, Friday, March 21, make no posts. Make no comments. Let there be NO new content added to LJ.
SUP obviously does not realize that Basic users have given something of value to them, that it is content that drives the site.
So, for one 24-hour period, from midnight GMT to midnight GMT, let's see how many people we can get to pledge to contribute NO CONTENT.
This will create a permanent downward spike in the daily-posts statistics, a permanent reminder of the power of the userbase.
Full information at The Fox's Den.
SPREAD THE WORD!
ETA at 3:50 PM - the interests seem to be back on the list - I wonder if the griping and threat about Make No Content Friday made a difference. I'm still taking Friday off from content-generation, and also from generating page views on LJ, because if you're here and logged in and doing something like reorganizing your tags or userpics, you're creating page-views, even if you're not making content. Instead, I'm going to spend an hour or so with a list of the RSS feeds I currently read on LJ, and import all of them to GoogleReader. Good to have another option, at least.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-17 05:27 pm (UTC)I was so pleased with their advisory board I really thought our new corporate overlords might not be so evil.
Well ... think of it this way. Russia is in the top five most dangerous places for journalists in the world. LJ is the primary blogging platform in Russia, and is a big part of alternative media/civil society there. SUP is a successful company in a country where business corruption is the norm. One of its heads is an oligarch with ties to Putin. Putin wants to crack down on journalism (and some don't think it's a coincidence that the sale was publicized on the same day of the controversial Russian election results). LJ is now subject to Russian laws that permit the successor to the KGB to datamine its data. There have already been privacy issues with SUP. Etc.
You can find better summaries here:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/25/opinion/edmorozov.php
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2006/10/25/turmoil-in-the-zhezhe/
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/is_livejournal.html
But my point is, if we look at the larger context of civil society in Russia, the fandom complaints seem a bit parochial, to me.
Anyway, have some more links:
http://eng.cnews.ru/news/top/indexEn.shtml?2008/03/13/291948
There is nothing unusual in closing of basic account registration, says Anton Nosik, head of the blog service at Sup. [...] ‘We do not consider it necessary to inform those, who have not opened a basic account during 9 years of LiveJournal’s existence, that there is no such an opportunity any longer’.
info on sleazy things that SUP has done to their Russian userbase in the past:
http://community.livejournal.com/no_lj_ads/tag/sup
kgb datamining:
http://krow.livejournal.com/567226.html
"since the segment is controlled by a company based in Russia, they must provide information to FSB (Federal Security Bureau (former KGB)) such detail of information about the users, that it would probably be constituted a privacy violation by US laws. Now that whole LJ is owned by a Russia-based company, all accounts are subject to this."
one Russian user's response to all this, which I think applies to a lot of fandom as well:
http://brad.livejournal.com/2368071.html?thread=14793799&format=light&style=mine#t14793799
When the first deal with SUP was in progress (and yes, you did participate in it), did you hear about the discussion in the Russian-language sector of LJ? Did you notice that people were desperately trying to find other platforms - and, true, there are none that could harbor not a set of separate individuals but a working network? Did you understand that people were worrying about a good (sometimes huge) part of their social existence, a part of their life? And that no Russian intellectual, or even an approximate intellectual, independently of other tastes, political stance, or anything else, had any trust whatsoever in SUP? If you did notice that, tell us why you endorsed the deal. If you did not, then you are, I am sorry, an incompetent after-the-fact mourner.