Translation of Adam‘s post (RUS)

The blogosphere is a fairly recent phenomenon in Kazakhstan. Although it does not yet have mass appeal, it is already quite complex, so let’s try and unpack it.We will not be looking at Russian platforms Liveinternet and Mail.ru. For some reason, the former became a “nest” for young teenagers, particularly those belonging to the “emo” subculture, which often elicits the scorn of other bloggers and geeks. As for the latter, its reputation is even worse due to the service’s aggressive approach. Mail.ru forcibly assimilates every account owner into its social network and blogs (the quality and safety of these services have long been scorned). Moving on.

The first blogs appeared in LiveJournal, with the oldest ones recently celebrating their 8^th anniversary. Like in Russia, LiveJournal here is the refuge of various experts and adults who work in creative fields. Unlike in Russia, users in Kazakhstan do not have deputies, opposition figures, or management personnel. However, one can find many truly interesting things here.

Local LiveJournals (like those everywhere) have fewer themed blogs – most of them are personal entries and photos mixed with news commentary and expert opinion on something or other. After the service was blocked in Kazakhstan during the fall of 2008, a small number of LJ users closed their accounts and migrated to other networks, opting for complicated ways of circumventing censorship.

LiveJournal’s most serious competitor in Kazakhstan is the domestic blog platform, Your Vision [www.yvision.kz]. Over a relatively short period of time, this service, which was the personal work of young Kazakh IT specialists, was able to attract hundreds of bloggers, primarily young people with an interest in new technologies and programming. After YV became a more dynamic platform, well-known bloggers began to appear there.

Developers in Kazakhstan have been using YV as a presentation and testing tool for their services. Although YV is dominated by LiveJournal in terms of numbers, it has great potential for development and growth. The past five years have seen the emergence of tens of new internet projects, many of which quickly gain popularity by offering products similar to foreign, but at a lower cost for clients (for many Kazakh users, internal traffic is free of charge).

As far as recent trends in the Kazakh blogosphere are concerned, I should note the country’s interest in microblogging, which has grown in the past year. Thousands of people – bloggers, journalists, geeks, activists – are flooding Twitter, which doesn’t require anyone to prepare long posts. The Kazakh Twitter community sees occasional instances of lengthy correspondence, but more often people share news, commentary or useful information.