LiveJournal, the personal Web publishing service that jump-started blogging in Russia, has been sold by its U.S. owner to a Russian business partner, who will operate it independently, the companies said on Sunday.
Six Apart Ltd said it sold the blog community site for undisclosed terms to SUP, a Russian-focused Internet media company led by an American and British duo that has expanded LiveJournal's Russian business over the past year.
The free, ad-supported blog site encourages users to keep online diaries they share and discuss with friends. It counts 14.3 million blog accounts and roughly 20 million visitors a month. Its writers publish more than 150,000 new posts a day.
"The deal will allow LiveJournal to get the attention, and frankly, the investment, to allow it to flourish," Andrew Paulson, SUP's chief executive, said in a phone interview.
Six Apart CEO Chris Alden said his company will focus on three properties it has created in-house: the widely used MovableType blog software, the TypePad blog hosting service and Vox, a blogging service aimed at less-technical users.
SUP said it is forming a new San Francisco-based company, LiveJournal Inc, to operate the service globally.
Alden said Six Apart will continue to partner with LiveJournal Inc, by supplying advertising and other services.
San Francisco-based Six Apart acquired LiveJournal in 2005 from its founder, Brad Fitzpatrick, who created the software in 1999 while a student at the University of Washington as a way for his friends to stay up-to-date on his latest Web postings.
Terms of that deal were never disclosed. Fitzpatrick left Six Apart this year and now works at Google Inc.
Market research firm Hitwise ranks LiveJournal as the fourth most popular personal blogging site among U.S. users, behind MySpace, Google Blogger, Yahoo 360 and ahead of Microsoft's "Live Spaces," Xanga and WordPress.
Source- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071203/wr_nm/blogging_livejournal_dc;_ylt=AqIkA4mkNPjHvtxMhcHusI0jtBAF
Behind LiveJournal's success is a history of technical innovations that have spread far beyond LiveJournal itself.
Its freely licensed software helps speed up database-driven sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia. OpenID is a single sign-on system that does away with passwords once a user signs on to any one OpenID-based Web site. AOL and Microsoft support OpenID and Google recently began testing the service.
Source- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071203/wr_nm/blogging_livejournal_dc;_ylt=AqIkA4mkNPjHvtxMhcHusI0jtBAF
Monday, December 3, 2007
LiveJournal- The blogging site has been sold
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