Global Voices this weekend reports on a Georgian blogger, Yuri Yakunin who was reportedly offered $300, by a mysterious man named only as Sergey, to write a negative post about Georgia’s President, Mikheil Saakashvili. However, rather than just accept the money, write the post, and run, Yakunin posted a report of the offer, and screenshots of his conversations with Sergey, online to prompt a public debate.

You can read a summary of the debate over at the ever excellent Global Voices, but I must confess I’m confused as to why anyone would have approached Yakunin in the first place. He’s already known as a blogger who can be critical of Saakashvili, so why would anyone waste $300 on such a post. Or perhaps (place tin hat firmly on head), it’s a double bluff of some kind, and Saakashvili supporters were offering the money in order to damage a the reputation of a high profile blogger who happens to be anti-Saak.

Based on Yakunin’s description of the approach, I also wonder why on earth anyone would accept the money in the first place. If someone called Sergey approached me via internet chat offering $300 to write a political post (sadly, no-one ever has), the first thing I’d wonder is how genuine are they. How could I ever trust someone who approaches me anonymously online offering cash?

Which brings me to my question. Does anyone out there have any knowledge or experience of how this blogging black market actually works. If you do, please share your knowledge in the comments below. I’d love to know how widespread, if at all, this practice is, and of how the process works.

Georgian blogger offered cash to write anti-Government blog post is a post from: Siberian Light

The magazine format that I’ve been using for nearly a year now has gone.  In its place is the tried and tested blog layout, powered by the Thesis theme.

Why?  Oddly, although I loved the previous magazine style theme, I found that it actually made me want to write less and less each week.  Because readers had to click through to a whole new page just to read a new post, I felt like each post had to be extra-special.  After all, if I were to take the time to click through to a new page, I know I’d feel just a little bit cheated if I clicked through to find just a two line observation – no matter how insightful!

I felt like I couldn’t post quicker, shorter, more off the cuff posts.  The kind that you hammer out in 10 minutes when you are really pissed of that Putin’s done something stupid, or when you see a cool video that you want to share.  I felt like I’d lost the freedom to do simple day to day blogging.

So, after taking time to think much more carefully about what I really want out of writing Siberian Light, I’ve bitten the bullet, ditched the magazine theme, and gone back to ‘proper’ blogging.  Short posts, long posts, really long posts, you name it.  Whatever I feel like, really.

New Thesis Theme

In case you were wondering, the new theme is called Thesis.  There isn’t much to the design that’s groundbreaking – instead it focuses on elegance, simplicity and just looking good. All the same things are here as you’d find on any other blog, so hopefully you should be able to find you way around Siberian Light’s new look pretty easily.

Under the hood is where the Thesis theme really excels.

It’s by far the easiest theme I’ve ever worked with (I had the new design installed, customised, and up and running in less than an hour) because almost everything is powered by an options panel, rather than forcing techno-incompetents like me to spend hours swearing while trying to make CSS and HTML work.

If you’re in the market for a new theme, I’d really recommend you take a look at Thesis.  It’s not free, but it was worth every cent I paid for it.  (And, yes – that’s an affiliate link.  In the interests of disclosure – if you buy the theme after clicking on the link, I get a small commission).

Comments changes

You might want to take a quick look at the comments for each post – there have been a couple of changes there, too.

Next to each person’s name is space for a small avatar picture.  If you’ve already got an avatar, you should see it next to your comments.  If you haven’t, visit the Gravatar website to get yours.  Check the example comment I’ve left below this post, and you’ll get to see what I look like.

I’ve also added a plugin called Comment Luv to automatically display each commenter’s last blog post.  I thought it would be an easy way to let commenters show off what they’ve been working on recently.  You can change the post it links to using the options underneath the comments box or even, if you’re feeling anti-social, ask it not to publish any links back to your blog.  If the plugin doesn’t display a recent post of yours, you might need to register with their site – use the link in the options box.

Finally, I just wanted to remind you that there’s another little tick box under the comments box called subscribe to comments.  Tick this box, and you’ll automatically be emailed whenever anyone else posts a comment to that particular thread.  It’s an easy way to follow a fast moving debate without having to check back in at the site every few hours.

Anyway, enough about design changes.  Watch this space for more posts.

Back to basics is a post from: Siberian Light

Warning – has your blog been hacked?

At the beginning of March, someone hacked into Siberian Light.

A not very nice person (from Russia, as it happens) changed one of the pages on SL to redirect visitors to that page on to various pornographic sites. At the same time, thousands of other sites were hacked, and links added to this particular page on SL. At one point, SL had such a boost in the Google rankings that around 10-20,000 one handed surfers were visiting SL every day.

Want to see how many websites linked to me? Take a look at my technorati page. According to them, Siberian Light is now one of the most popular blogs in the world (and by far and away the most popular Russia Blog)…!

Once Google noticed, my search engine rankings dropped like a stone – at one point, I didn’t even rank for the search “Siberian Light”. Visitors from Google went from several hundred per day to less than 30.

Happily, I fixed the damage pretty quickly, but SL has taken an absolute hammering in the search engines and is only now beginning to slowly recover its rankings.

Similar hacks affected lots of other blogs – including some about Russia. So, if you are running wordpress make sure you check your blog and upgrade to version 2.5 if necessary.

More details here.

Do you twitter?

I’ve been playing around with the micro-blogging service twitter recently, to see if it’s any good.

Because each post is limited to a maximum of 140 characters (yes, that’s characters, not words) it encourages short, snappy posts.

At the moment I’m using it to post thoughts that are too brief to merit a full post here on Siberian Light.

You can check out my feed and follow me at: http://twitter.com/siberianlight

Neeka is also twittering, as Smetanka. Is anyone else?

Blog roundup

OK, enough warnings and twitterings, onto the blogs. And, be warned, there’s a bumper list of links below. I recommend settling down with a nice cup of coffee and working your way through them, one by one.

Sean takes the top spot this month. Or, to be more precise, the readers and commenters of Sean’s Russia Blog take the award for ‘most interesting discussion in absolutely ages’.

Take a look at Putin’s Historic Achievement and Avoiding This Heap of Memes for two of the most wide-ranging and knowledgeable discusions I’ve seen about Russia for quite some time.

And it took at least a hundred comments before the inevitable row broke out…

Everyone else has had a hard act to follow this month, but here’s my pick of the best posts:

• Russian War Tubas!
• Wintrhop 360 beats Da Russophile to the punch and posts her top 10 Russophile predictions. My favourite? Russia to become the new Scandinavia.
• Da Russophile fans will need to content themselves with the Top 10 Russophobe Myths for the time-being.
• Tim Newman deconstructs A Russian’s View of Britain and then goes on to ask if Russia’s mega-projects are realistic.
• The Turkish Invasion of Russia has stalled, so he’s moved on to an easier target – Ukraine: The Bridebasket of Europe.
• Da Russophile examines Putin’s Presidency in Polls. Lots of pretty graphs.
• Vladimir Gushchin reminisces about his childhood in Libya, where has parents worked at the Soviet embassy.
• Gushchin also laments the Russian aerospace industry being late to market, yet again.
• The Moscow Blog’s guide to getting around by Metro.
• Soviet May Day Postcards from Russian Kafe.
• And some Soviet Propaganda posters from Russophile.
• Two-Zero asks: Is Moscow becoming the New New York?
• All you need to know about the ??????? ????.
• Eternal Remont is now troll friendly.
• Mark MacKinnon explains why the Kremlin is pulling for Hillary.
• Otto talks about German and Jewish emigration movements in the USSR.
• Patrols of Russian strategic bombers may be on the rise, but nuclear submarine patrols are decreasing.
• Soviet Russia remembers Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
• Mikhail Zadornov – Russia’s top satirist?

So, what do you think?  Did I miss anything?  If so, let me know by commenting below.

Russia blogging roundup (plus other important stuff) is a post from: Siberian Light

Ditching the traditional blog layout of one post after another, newest at the top, I’ve decided to go with a magazine style design which, I hope will make Siberian Light much easier on the eye and much easier to navigate.

The magazine style format lends itself to featuring some articles more prominently than others. I plan to start writing a few more in depth articles over the coming weeks and months, interspersed with more traditional, shorter, blog posts, so I felt I needed a way to highlight those posts that would be of interest to readers for longer than the current day’s hot news story.

As far as I can see, most everything is working properly. However, I haven’t had chance to check the site in a few web-browsers, so if you spot any glitches, please do let me know.

Anyway, here’s a quick guide to the new features.

Featured Articles

The focus of the new Siberian Light homepage is the latest featured post. A big picture right in the middle of the page means you shouldn’t be able to miss it. And, just underneath the latest featured article, you’ll find a series of smaller pictures – click on these, and details of earlier featured articles will be brought to the fore.

Click on the title of any of these featured articles, or the ‘continue reading’ link, and you’ll be taken the article itself.

A few of Siberian Light’s older posts are already featured – keep an eye out for the next one in a few days.

Regular Blog Posts

Just because there will be more features at Siberian Light doesn’t mean there will be less regular blog posts. Right underneath the featured articles, you’ll find links to the 10 latest blog posts, with a brief introduction to each post.

The Sidebar

The sidebar on the right has been completely revamped. The big grey box you see is to help you navigate around the site. It contains details of the most popular recent posts (ranked by a behind the scenes formula), the posts with the most comments, a list of featured articles, and a tag cloud which you can use to navigate the site by topic.

Below the navigation box, you’ll find a more traditional sidebar, with links to other blogs about Russia, as well as links to the Siberian Light archives. These are sorted by both category and month – click on the title to reveal the links below.

Oh, and there are a few colourful ads rotating around the sidebar help to pay the hosting costs for Siberian Light.

Subscribe!

Did you know that you can subscribe to Siberian Light? You can either choose to receive a daily email digest of posts, straight to your inbox, or you can have every post delivered almost instantaneously to your RSS feed reader of choice. Subscription options are at the top right of the page, next to the big orange RSS button.

New Year, New Look is a post from: Siberian Light

“Just imagine how many unknown stories and photos are hidden in Chinese Web sites and available only to a Chinese audience,” he wrote in an e-mail. “So we decided to start from the country we know, or, to be exact, Russia and the countries comprising the former Soviet Union.”

Tim refused to give his full name, saying by telephone that, as a serious Web designer, he did not want his name associated with the site.

There are some fascinating stats in the article. I’m green with envy at the level of traffic English Russia receives – approximately 200,000 visitors per day and, back in August this year, English Russia was the 155th most popular blog in the world, according to Technorati’s ranking. As I write this, the ranking has fallen slightly to a not at all unimpressive 242nd!

The common complaint about English Russia resurfaces – there’s nothing new on it:

“There’s nothing original,” said Mikhail Chekanov of Rambler Media, owner of the Russian search engine Rambler.ru. Chekanov said the site just picks up items from other Russian Web sites.

Interestingly, the article shied away from directly addressing copyright issues.

But the model seems to be working well enough for Tim – English Russia has earnt enough over the last year or so for him to hire his first full time employee, who spends most of his time scouring Russian websites for interesting things to post.

English Russia creator interviewed is a post from: Siberian Light

Over the past few weeks thousands of Russian bloggers have united to combat a pharmaceutical scam that tried to persuade Russian pensioners to spend around half of their annual pension on a course of Gravikol 21 – ‘anti-arthritis’ drugs that were actually little more than vitamin pills.

In the course of their campaign, Russia’s bloggers have not only publicised the scam nationwide, they’ve forced the notoriously unresponsive Russian government to act.

In perhaps the most startling expression of their offline power, Russia’s bloggers made 21 million (!) phone calls to the offending company’s switchboard, forcing it into meltdown.

The story has hardly been heard outside of Russia – try a Google News search for Gravikol, if you don’t believe me – but it will fundamentally alter perceptions of how Russian bloggers can influence Russian public life.

How Russia’s Bloggers discovered the Gravikol 21 scam

Early in October, blogger Brockhurst received a telephone call from his elderly mother, desperate for money to buy expensive anti-arthritis medication she had heard advertised on the radio. Incensed that his mother had been so desperate to buy these drugs that she had been in tears on the phone, he did a litle digging, and on October 12 rockhurst posted the news about Gravikol on his blog:

“These drugs cost R30,000 (approximately $1,500), but for today for one day only they are offering a discount for pensioners and this essential medicine for the elderly costs just R22,000 ($890). A courier will come for the money tonight… She said she had heard a radio program on which well-known cardiologists with unfamiliar surnames recommended that all elderly people use the medicine Gravikol 21 for joint pain. Take the course of 38 packets and your joints won’t trouble you for 10 years. Cardiologists. About joints — huh? Recommendations — bastards.”

(The above link is in Russian – click here for a Google Translation)

In fact, Gravikol 21 (also known as Gravikoll 21 or just plain Gravicol) was little more than “gelatin mixed with ascorbic acid and fruit flavoring.” Arthritis sufferers would do themselves more good by just eating healthily and taking regular vitamins.

And the cardiologists recommending Gravikol 21? Well, lets just say that they weren’t famous until after the Graviskol storm broke…

The first reaction of Russian bloggers was one of (justified) fury, and 5,000 comments were left on Brockhurst’s blog – the maximum that is allowed on a single livejournal post. Within hours, outraged fellow bloggers were also writing about, and digging deeper into, the story.

Direct action turns into phone meltdown

The bloggers fury soon turned into direct action when someone came up with the bright idea of publishing the telephone number of Farmit, the manufacturers of Gravikol 21, and suggested that everyone give them a call.

Soon Farmit’s number was posted on internet forums all over Russia for all to see. Sometimes associated with the Gravikol story, sometimes attached to ads for too good to be true real estate deals, sometimes with pictures of sexy and ‘available’ Russian girls attached…

Blogger Evgeny Morozov writes:

Most of those who called in on purpose and not because they were misinformed could be generally split into three big camps: those who hanged up or went silent after getting connected, those who tried to appeal to the decency of the Farmit staff by either cursing them or trying to reasonable explain the problem, and those who placed orders for “Gravikol 21?. This third group wrecked most havoc on the Farmit operations, possibly halting them at some point. By placing orders to non-existing locations or by canceling the orders after the couriers have arrived, the callers managed to distract Farmit from fulfilling the genuine orders. Even if it’s just one per cent of those who called in placed an order, this means that 210,000 orders had to be fulfilled within just 2-3 days, a task that sounds nearly impossible even for a big pharma company. Obviously, the ensuring effect on the moral of the couriers should not be underestimated.

Morozov reports one blogger’s estimate that Farmit’s received 21 million calls in the week after this story broke. That seems a little extreme to me, but the number of calls was clearly massive.

The tactic caused chaos at Farmit as they struggled to not only answer their phones, but to deal with the mountain of fake orders they received. In effect, as Morozov notes, the attack was an offline denial of service (DDOS) attack – and it sent Farmit’s switchboard into meltdown.

Calling in the big guns

However, this story gets more interesting when the Russian blogosphere moved beyond its initial kneejerk reaction, and turned its rage into calculated political action.

…in a popular post on 13 October well-known blogger Tatyana Tikhomirova (tanchik), a St Petersburg-based doctor, raised doubts about the real use of such actions. She wrote: “Sure, together we can block this (call) center without any problems, they will change the number and advertise the new one, but we won’t be able to block all the centers as interest in this issue will tail off… MY SUGGESTION IS NOT TO TRY TO DESTROY A SECOND CENTER OR ANY CENTER AT ALL. BUT TO TRY TO JOIN FORCES TO GET A SUBSTANTIVE RESULT….” She suggested that over the next 10 days bloggers collect together instances of advertisements that make unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of any dietary supplements, not just Gravikol 21. This material could then form the basis of an open letter of complaint to officials, which bloggers would sign via a special website and would circulate as widely as possible on the Internet and hopefully in the mainstream media. Banner for farma–fake LiveJournal community (community.livejournal.com/farma–fake, 13 October)

Source: Russia: A Week in the Russian Blogosphere, 13-19 October, OSC [US Open Source Center] Report, November 1, 2007 (not available online)

It probably helped that the story was quickly picked up by Evgeny Roizman, a Russian Duma deputy from Ekaterinburg who is also a fairly prominent livejournal blogger. Within a few days of Brockhurst’s original post, Roizman had written to the Prosecutor General’s Office, demanding that they either confirm that Farmit’s actions were legal or, otherwise, open an investigation.

The involvement of a Duma deputy, combined with the sheer number of bloggers writing about the Gravikol 21 story meant that even the Russian mainstream media couldn’t ignore the story for long. After a few brief internet and radio reports, the story hit the big time on 17 October, when State TV channel Rossiya dedicated four minutes to a report on their main evening news bulletin.

Alerting President Putin

If you really want to get something done in Russia, you go right to the top. There is a long tradition of appealing to the leader (whether he be the Tsar, Party Secretary or President) for special help, so a campaign also quickly began to bring the story to the attention of President Putin.

Fortunately, Putinwas scheduled to host his annual televised Q&A session later that week, on the 18th October. The Q&A was set up to give Russian people the opportunity to phone in and in person ask Putin’s opinion on the burning issues of the day. This was too good an opportunity for Russia’s bloggers to miss, and a sustained campaign began to get a question about Gravikol-21 on the air.

Did Russia’s bloggers win?

Sadly, despite hundreds, if not thousands of calls, nobody ever got to ask Putin a question about Gravikol-21 on the air. But it seems fairly likely that the sheer volume of calls was noticed by his office. It wasn’t long before public officials began making statements on the affair:

On 16 October RIA-Novosti reported that chief public health official Gennadiy Onishchenko called on consumers to report any cases where dietary supplements were falsely advertised, while senior Federal Antimonopoly Service official Sergey Puzyrevskiy told Izvestiya newspaper on 25 October that the service had begun preliminary inquiries about the advertisements.

Source: Russia: A Week in the Russian Blogosphere, 13-19 October, OSC [US Open Source Center] Report, November 1, 2007 (not available online)

The Graviskol 21 story isn’t over yet – nobody has been charged, and Farmit are still in business. But the word is out – big time.

It would take a courageous, not to mention stupid, government official to give Farmit the all clear now. If they did, Russia’s bloggers would just take up arms again and, this time, their target might be the government…

Update: Hat tip to Blue Bloggin, which has dug out this link to an English language product page for Gravicol (note the ‘c’ in the spelling).

In 1997, Purdue University published information with promising news that Graviola has a special affinity for helping to maintain the normal functions of DNA activities in cellular meatoblism. Gravicol tincture helps to maintain a healthy immune system

At least the company selling Gravicol in the US (Infogenesis) aren’t marketing it as an anti-arthritis drug.

Russian bloggers expose Gravikol 21 pharmaceutical scam targeting pensioners is a post from: Siberian Light

Here are the top five – see if you can guess why I like this ranking method better than previous attempts…

The list covers the “Top 50 blogs”, in both English and German, and there are some interesting blogs out there – including a few I hadn’t discovered before. Krusenstern’s post is well worth a visit, if only to browse the list and discover a few new blogs.

Some interesting debate in the comments, too, mostly involving La Russophobe.

One particular point, which I hadn’t considered before, covers whether blogs should publicly release their Sitemeter data. The potential problem with this is that it also displays quite a lot of information about the site’s visitors, including (partial) details of each visitor’s IP address. I think, over the next few days, I’ll need to consider whether it is appropriate to keep this data publicly available. In the meantime, any thoughts welcome.

More tracking of who is the top dog Russia blog is a post from: Siberian Light