It's not often that the front page of the New York Times has a Cyrillic headline as the main story on its homepage. But that's just what the users of LiveJournal were able to achieve this weekend. The community which the New York Times launched on LiveJournal has made waves across the globe. The community's moderators had a simple goal, to publish articles written by New York Times journalists and then offer Russian web-user the chance to comment. The project turned out to be a simple "breakthrough" to quote one of the paper's key editors.

LiveJournal is a platform and anyone is welcome to post whatever they want, as long as they stay within clear guidelines on taste and decency. And this weekend the users of LiveJournal showed that the site is one of the most effective communications platform in Russia. But what changed this weekend was that for perhaps the first time the platform, thanks to the translations by the New York Times and the republication of comments from LiveJournal users on NewYorkTimes.com, became a vehicle for a mass international audience to find out what Russians think of their own country.

The New York Times have more articles to publish and hopefully LiveJournal users have more comments to make. As we have said before, the development of LiveJournal as a global platform is an important challenge for SUP, and the experience of this weekend has provided many valuable learnings. Let's see what happens next!

For those of you who are interested in the statistics of this project, then the following should be of interest. In the first four days since the establishment of nytimesinmoscow community 1,328 users signed up to read it, while 730 became members. The first article from the new series gathered 2,512 comments. Yandex.Blogs search finds 230 direct links to the community's first post, while Google comes up with 659 mentions of the project outside of LiveJournal.

The folks at Yahoo! have no doubt had rather a few things on their minds over the past few days.  However, they have still had time to complete an interesting piece of research on their Russian audience!  Last year we hooked up with Yahoo! to sell the advertising slots in the pages served to Russian IP addresses to local advertisers.  SUP’s sale house +SOL have been doing this for some time and have been waiting for this data to strengthen their sales case.  The results reveal some interesting insights into the use of major English language sites which Russian web-users have come to rely on.  The best news, from an advertising point of view is that Yahoo!’s users are wealthy, with more than 18% of them earning at least $2,000 per month.  What’s just as interesting is just how popular the English language is for undertaking searches, with more than three quarters of all searches being carried out in English.  The top five non-Russian sites which they use include Wikipedia, MSN and of course LiveJournal!  But their familiarity with English only goes so far, nearly 75% of all surverys were completed in Russian.