Tech (and Web 2.0) in Russia

FACT: The RedOrbit tech-news site this week covered the European research and consulting firm GoalEurope’s release of its “Rating of Russian Web 2.0 Companies” (by Natasha Starkell, GoalEurope, June 12, 2008).  According to the research report, “We have looked at each of the 378 websites to provide an extensive coverage of the Russian Web 2.0 space.” The report includes a characterization of the top websites across categories like news sites, blogs, social networks, photo/video sharing, Question/Answering sites, bookmarking, music, search engines, RSS feeds, online file storage and sharing, and other specialized sites, and a full ranking by Alexa-generated usage statistics.  Get the full pdf report here – and see the excerpted Top 10 list below.

Tagging in Esperanto

Fact: “Russian search leader Yandex has released their Autumn report on the current state of the blogosphere in Russia [source: Nick Wilsdon, CEO of the e3internet group]… Some of the highlights:

• There are now 3.1m blogs in Runet [the Russian-language areas of the Internet], 2.6 times larger than this time last year…
• The blogosphere in Russia represents 3% of the global total…
• Now there are more Russian language blogs than French, German or Portuguese ones, but less than blogs in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, English or Japanese…
• About 7000 new blogs appear daily in Runet.”

Analysis: I found the numbers on Russian-language blogging interesting, and not only because I still remember some of my schoolboy Russki. (I’ve forgotten nearly all my Arabic and Maltese.)

Comparing the velocity of blog-growth in Runet (the term used quasi-officially to refer to all of the Russian-language and Russian-geographic areas of the entire Internet) with the growth of all global blogs shows Russian is a mover, but not the biggest one.