Over 60% of Russian blogs now reside in domestic-based blog-hostings, informs Yandex research. As at September 2006, there are over 1,150,000 blogs in Russian. The Big Four of popular blog hostings are Livejournal.com, Liveinternet.ru, Blogs.mail.ru, and Diary.ru. 60% of Russian bloggers are women (compared to only 46% in the USA). The average age of the Russian blogger is 21 and there are more students than graduates. Almost 80% of bloggers live in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Corporate blogs on the .ru zone are only just taking off: from the non-Internet companies in the research, corporate blogs were only noted in the Stardogs fastfood company.

Once again the orthodox banner exchange network Blagochestie.ru has opened. The project exists since 2004 and it proposes the exchange of banners in formats of 468x60 and 120x240 pixels. The press centre of the Association of Orthodox Web-Designers details that about 700 orthodox websites are involved in the banner network. And they are pretty varied, too. For example, you can now download acts of worship in MP3 format. Another popular advertising network is Orthodox Russia, which is interesting because of its charity mechanisms: major resources and participants may transfer a part of their showings to increase the hits on smaller orthodox resources.

The Russian program for sending space tourists to the International Space Station now involves Iranian citizen Anousheh Ansari, who set about the running of the first space Internet diary, Space Explorer. Readers may find the first orbital recording, Hello World! in which Anousheh describes in detail her feelings from the launch of the spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. A second before the start, Anousheh remembered her husband left behind on Earth before she felt the G-force.

Soon, residents of Moscow will be able to get to know their district policeman over the Internet, informed Deputy Head of the RF Ministry of Interior Affairs Mikhail Sukhodolsky. It is true that we are not talking here about a dating service, rather about simply how to identify a person employed in the militia police force. The photographs of the district policemen will be published on the Russian Federation Security Portal so residents would have no doubt about the identity of the person knocking on the door. In addition to photos, diagrams of the sector serviced by a given policeman, the addresses of the district offices of the militia, telephone numbers, working hours, and a list of questions which you may address to your district policeman will also be placed on the portal.

Sberbank of Russia has announced the intention to develop a system of remote servicing of clients. According to the President and Chairman of the Board Andrei Kazmin there are 30,000 clients to a branch in Moscow, despite there being about 800 branches throughout the capital. And the area of a typical branch rarely exceeds 100 square metres, leading to the crush on pension day. The problem with expanding the floor area of branches is linked with high property prices. Sberbank sees a solution to the problem in automation and servicing at a distance through remote terminals. However, the word "Internet" has yet to be heard in these forecasts.

The fourth part of the Civil Code, adopted this week, promises companies that violate copyright laws the confiscation of equipment and their liquidation. Maximum imprisonment for copyright infringement will be six years instead of five as before. The maximum fine has now risen from 300,000 to 500,000 roubles. The names of websites are becoming personal property: a person who acquires a domain becomes the holder of the rights to its name. However for now this is of no particular concern to Russians; as the well-known saying goes, "the severity of Russian laws is surpassed only by the laxity of its enforcement".

Services that are created with account of people’s real requirements differ from those that are created on the basis of a Web 2.0 trend through cloning. Take a practical task, such as giving birth to and bringing up a healthy child. The solution of the “service operatives” would be to take a trendy mechanism and screw on a sign saying “For Mums”. “Blogs for Mums”, for example. However, maintaining a blog does not give answers to the day-today questions you get from young parents. Now take the resources that are made by the mothers themselves and collected in our contest site. They are completely different: (1) specialised sites with information you won’t find on general portals, such as information on twins; 2) subject-based forums, unlike single blogs, are specially “honed” to exchange experience; (3) online consultancy with doctors in the form of individual services; (4) services to arrange collective actions, such as joint purchasing. Naturally, anything that brings in fast money will be cloned. However, the surplus of clones actually kills them off: the boom in dating services will pass just as the boom in SMS-text services. And yet these same technologies could be used in more “human” services, where there is no danger of collapse.

The Minister for IT and Communications Leonid Reiman believes that from 2000 the Russian information and communications technology (ICT) sector has been growing four times faster than the Russian economy. He made this declaration at the Fourth Baikal Economic Forum in Irkutsk. The Minister also remarked that in 2005 ICT accounted for 5% of the country’s GDP. Here, Russia has something to aim for, as in developed countries this figure is around the 10% mark.

From the 25th October, Russians submitting documents for immigration visas to the USA need to complete an application on the US State Department’s website. This innovation does not yet concern the Consulate General in St. Petersburg or the Consulate General in Yekaterinburg: here applicants for non-immigration visas can for now use the old format for visa applications. It is assumed that the use of the electronic application will help to standardize and make safer the process of applying for a visa.

A former member of staff of the Internet provider Trank has been arrested in Astrakhan. After being laid off, the fraudster retained administrator rights in the company’s network, charged money to the personal accounts of subscribers, which he then appropriated. He also had access to the database of the provider’s PIN codes, which he then went onto sell. Finally, he modified the details of certain company subscribers, which meant he could appropriate their traffic and sell it to others. The total loss incurred because of the fraudster came to over 500,000 roubles. The arrested man was sacked from his job owing to his drug habit and already held two previous convictions.