Thursday, August 11, 2011

Why Is LiveJournal So Russian?

(This post has been transferred here just in case it's responsible for this blog's otherwise unexplained audience in Russia.)

A confession (should I try to scale down the font to make it look like a whisper): I don't actually read Russian. I used to work in Washington offices where it seemed to be a status symbol to hand a Russian address to someone using a U.S. word processor and say, "Send them a copy of this." I used to carry around a cheat-sheet for phonetic transcriptions. I also have, on my hard drive at home, a huge "Words & Names" database (prints out to about 1000 pages, 8-point Times Roman) that incorporates a phonetic Russian dictionary; for just one e-dollar you can use the e-mail link at the top of the page to request fun facts about any word or name from the database. But I don't understand the language at all.

So all the clever blogs posted on LiveJournal in Russian are lost on me, and it's sort of annoying to read the "Writer's Block" posts and find that 29 of the first 30 posts are Russian, or go to the ads page and find that all the ads are Russian...

Here, a more empathetic American whose screen name is Stryck explains their point of view:

http://stryck.livejournal.com/846155.html

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