There has been a lot of Doctor Who posting here this month, and there will be more as I am way behind with reviews of the audio plays I have been listening to. Here is a little alternative content.

So, Livejournal has been sold to the Russians. I am fairly convinced by Mark Kraft’s thought on the subject, from which I have taken the title of this post (“Trust, but verify”, Ronald Reagan’s old catchphrase). I am perhaps half a degree more optimistic, for a couple of reasons. The first is that SixApart were lousy owners of LJ. The infamous nipplegate and strikethrough controversies indicated that at heart this was a company that really didn’t care about the product or its consumers. Various statistics suggest that Livejournal use has been falling off of late. Change is not necessarily a bad thing, and change was needed here. (In more SixApart news, I’ve seen two blogs using their Moveable Type interface practically immobilised by technical difficulties in the last couple of months.)

The second is that despite predictions of doom when SUP took over Livejournal’s Russian operations over a year ago, I haven’t picked up any scary stories of interference with Russian content by the service provider to the extent that SixApart felt they needed to do with some of the English content. Livejournal is a significant brand in Russia, where blogging is often referred to as ЖЖ (short for Живой журнал, the Russian for Livejournal) and many prominent political and other public figures use it; the Russian sector of Livejournal has apparently doubled in size in the last year. That’s not to say that a Kremlin-inspired crackdown on content is impossible, of course. But SUP are quoted in the Moscow Times (for what that’s worth) as saying that the new owner, Alexander Mamut, is more interested in money than politics.

The third, and perhaps the least weighty (and admittedly none of these reasons for relative optimism is terribly weighty) is that the new ownership have started well by forming a LiveJournal Advisory Board. Mark Kraft, as quoted above, fears that this will be mere window-dressing, and of course he’s right that it has no actual power. But even that appearance of listening to users was beyond SixApart, and as straws in the wind go, I think this one is blowing in the right direction.