Last week’s Russian media seminar at the University of Birmingham raised an interesting question: Why has the Russian Government left the blogosphere (more or less) free? It’s generally agreed that Russian TV is under total control of the Government, and newspapers are almost under the thumb - but the lively Russian blogosphere continues to be a big free-for-all of free expression.

The only cloud on the horizon seems to be the acquisition last year of the Russian licence for Live Journal from 6 Apart. It was bought by a Company known as Soup (Sup-Fabrik), owned by the Oligarch Alexander Mamut, a friend of Roman Abramovich, and some say, a friend of the Kremlin. It doesn’t really matter whose friend he is. In Russia, a rich person has a lot to lose, as the Kremlin has aptly demonstrated in the past. Therefore it is wise for a rich person to take a hint from on high.

But the Kremlin so far does not seem to have put any pressure of Live Journal or its users. Ivan Zassorsky of Moscow University - who worked as PR Man for Soup at the time of the sale of Live Journal, reflected on why this might be.

“When you build a central system of command and control, you have to have a feedback system to know what is going on,” he said. So the Russian blogosphere might be how the Government keeps its feel on the pulse of opinion.

Vlad Strukov of Leeds and London Universities pointed out that the Russian internet, though lively, is far from being a mass influencer of public opinion - so perhaps the Government can afford to ignore it. 10% of Russians have internet access, where the UK hit that figure in 1998. Still, you can see five people sitting around one terminal in an internet cafe, so it’s hard to measure the full reach of the internet: besides what do people do at work all day in offices the world over? Obviously they cruise the internet and write their blogs.

Oleg Kozlovskii Co-ordinator of the Oborona Youth Movement pointed out that the authorities are not unaware of the internet. He said that before the recent demonstrations in St. Petersburg, a number of sites belonging to NGOs mysteriously went down. He’s also noticed the pro-Kremlin youth movement, Nashi flooding the Russian blogosphere with similar postings on political tops.

For now, the Russian blogosphere appears to be a slightly wild place, but one that is pretty much free from political interference. It’s somewhat elitist, belonging to those few who have access to a good internet connection, but those who are in it have upwards of 1000 “friends” or online contacts. Stories can spread. One striking example the tale of a village priest and his family, murdered in an arsen attack on his house. It wasn’t until a blogger in the next village - the wife of another priest - blogged about it, that the story got around the blogosphere via “friends” and then into the traditional media.

Maybe the Kremlin doesn’t take the networking power of blogs seriously enough. If so, it wouldn’t be the first large organisation to have made that mistake.

Doing your own web design can be very useful as a site owner because you won’t need to hire a web designer to make every little change you might need, but there are many design concepts to consider when making and editing a site, so if you don’t have time to learn web site design yourself then hiring a professional could be your best choice.

I have a new MacBook (this time my own, not on loan) but still have to run Windows to use my favorite editing program, Sony Sound Forge. For me, this means putting Windows in a virtual terminal run by Parallels.

The latest edition of Parallels makes it almost seamless. I can drag files from the Apple window to the Windows window. I can run Sound Forge in “Coherence” mode so it looks just like a program on the Mac desktop. It’s also dead easy to install Vista. Just put the disk in the drive, put the license number into Parallels, and press “go”.

I thought I might as well get hold of Windows Vista and bought a copy on eBay for around £85. The edition I bought was supposed to be sold with hardware, and this turned out to be a piece of useless cable included inside the envelope. As I discovered the hard way, you have to make sure you get the 32 bit edition to run on parallels. I had to resell the 64 bit and buy a 32 bit. In the course of this hiccup, I learned the pros and cons of 32 bit V 64 bit vista. I appears that 64 Bit has more security features, but not all hardware drivers work with it.

My impressions of Vista? It looks nicer than XP, and the desktop sidebar is a good place to put widgets but unfortunately, I can’t quite be bothered to dig deeply because I’m still learning tricks on the Mac. I don’t want to throw myself to deeply into the Mac V Vista debate, but I will say that I consider my Mac to be a bit of an indulgence. It’s a beautiful top quality machine, but it comes are a really steep price. I love it, but it is elitist. I’m afraid Mac isn’t going to take over world just yet for this reason alone.

Well that’s a relief. I just noticed that most of our archives had gone walkies and were returning not-found pages. After trying various things, I updated the permalink structure in WordPress. This seemed to do the trick. It’s worth remembering for future.

I finally got round to upgrading to the WordPress 2.1 series. In the past I’ve found it a bit of a hassle to upgrade, particularly as I’m responsible for a few blogs. But this neat little instant upgrade plug in did the work for me, in one click. I really recommend it. And there was no need to change permissions on my files, which made it even easier.

I think what I like most about this version of WordPress is that you can easily switch between the visual editor and the code editor, by clicking a tab. Visual is nice for most things, but code is good for sorting out a tangle when it arises.

My intuition about Russian blogs is that independent minded people are distrustful of the traditional media in Russia, which they see as controlled by the Government - and by extension I think many of them think the foreign media is not much better. It’s rather what has gone on in America after the Iraq War where people felt that the media was not sticking up for them enough, and was to soft on the political leaders. It’s natural for people like this to turn to blogs for free expression.

Having spent a few days now immersed in the Russian blogosphere, I’m convinced that this is right, and there is something very alive and growing here. Even though internet penetration is still low, it’s on the up. People have computers at work. At home they are getting quite prosperous thanks to the oil economy and are starting to buy their own computers.

There are 1.5 million blogs according to Yandex, a leading Russian search engine. You can see that some of the most active Russian bloggers post several times a day and frequently attract 50+ comments per post. Abramovich’s divorce is much discussed today. However, it would appear from the blogus and technorati that they don’t link to each other as much as in the West. This is a pity, because blogs become powerful when a story gets into circulation and starts to spread. I also think that use of RSS is in its infancy. For some reason, Livejournal is very much the blog engine of choice. It would be nice if it were a bit less concentrated in one place, because that makes it a bit easier to control. If blogs were using a greater variety of publishing tools, they would be safer from pressure.

I’m in strangely familiar surroundings, the iconic Bush House, HQ of the BBC World Service, where I’ve spent many days (and nights) in the past. I hope that this time I won’t be in for a ten year stretch. Actually, I’m here to work on an interesting blog project for the Russian Service for a month or so. In the past I worked as a producer on English business programmes. Ocasionally, I see some of my former colleagues on the stairs, still running to the studio as they always did, still in a mad rush to keep the cycle of news turning 24 hours a day.

Here, I enjoy being surrounded by Russians who can create a homely atmosphere anywhere they land - even inside a big corporation. My Russian is pretty rusty, but I’m trying to soak up some of the conversation, and am peering at Russian blogs trying to decipher them. My first little trip will be to Birmingham for a Russian media conference. Later I’ll be going to Moscow for a few days.

In the meantime, I stumbled across this (English) blog entry about the 15 web principles for BBC2.0. It’s really interesting to see the influence of blogs on the mainstream media, especially when it comes to the advice to create an informal conversation and to link out to rich content.

I still think journalists have a problem linking out. It was so discouraged in the past, that they have trouble understanding that now they are supposed to do it as part of the service to readers. If you want to build a bridge to the informal media - and that’s part of what I’m trying to do here - then linking out is the first small practical step. Culturally, though, it’s a giant leap.

I’m really pleased to see that Exbiblio are restarting the blog which I worked on for a good chunk of last year. I’m sure that Exbiblio’s Claes-Fredrik is the right person to blog for them, as he’s really on top of the technology, and writes his own blog. I’ll be very interested to read how they are progressing in Seattle.

In the meantime Blog Relations is probably as busy as we’ve ever been. Having recovered from my stomach upset, I’m continuing to record a novel that my business partner, Matthew, had quite a bit to do with. Rob the actor is coming back to read on tomorrow. More on that as it unfolds.

And next week I’m starting what is, for us, a major project - though it’s I suppose it’s quite small beer for our client, which is the BBC’s Russian service. This assignment should keep me going for the next 4 to 6 weeks, and will take me to Moscow for a few days. I hope to be able to tell you more about it later - all I can say now is that I’m starting to try and decipher the writings of a few of Russia’s 1.5 million bloggers.

This is very much our way of thinking: podcasts are a great way for authors to reach an audience independently of publishers. The New York Times photographs Scott Sigler podcasting from his cupboard. (The cupboard has good acoustics, but I don’t know how the photographer squeezed in their too). Scott is the author of Earth Core and other science fiction horror stories. Since he started podcasting, he’s been signed up by a small Canadian Publisher and now has a New York literary agent.

Books and stories are great territory for podcasting.

Here’s another case of America’s ridiculously harsh legal system. A teacher found her computer flooded with pornographic pop-ups in class. She was frantically trying to click them away, but they kept on popping up. In a ridiculous twist, the police were called and she was charged with harming a minor. She refused to plea-bargain and now faces up to 40 years in jail! For a pop-up!

It’s an internet nightmare, but it has an internet solution. Naturally Julie Amero has a blog to help her raise funds to fight her case.

We’ve been working on a nice little project this week - though it’s had its ups and downs, I think it’s going to turn out well.

We are recording an abridged version of a novel - I won’t say what it is yet but it’s published by a mainstream publishing house in the UK, and our client is the author who is using to his marketing budget to fund it. The idea is to podcast the audio, and see if that helps sales of this book, and the next in the series, and to see if it can help interest a US publisher. All I’ll say at the moment about the book is that it’s a bit of a thriller-mystery, and that my business partner, Matthew, is very much involved with the original book.

We’ve hired an actor called Rob Maloney to read it. It took us a day for him to find the voice, but now he’s very much into it and finding all sorts of shades and tones which add the appropriate atmosphere of mystery and suspense. Although one has to respect the efforts of Librivox, having a professional actor read a novel makes a huge difference.

There have been a few problems: first we have builders here in Star Street, so day one was a big trip out to Tunbridge where Matthew lives. There I found that the line-in socket on my digital recorder was broken - although it had been working the night before. I had to hold it in place with my finger.

On Tuesday we got rid of the builders for the day and I swapped to the mini-disc back in Paddington. Rob and I went out to a local Lebanese cafe -where I’ve eaten lots of times - and on the way back I was feeling a bit queezy. Well I’ve been pretty ill for the last 48 hours, and although I suspect the houmos, Rob seems okay.

So we resume the thriller tomorrow.