After being trained in “the ways of the blog” by Six Apart, LiveJournal is now finally migrating off of its former parents servers and is setting up shop in the middle of Montanna.

(LiveJournal News) The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We’re moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. [...]

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we’re going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

LiveJournal was previously sold to SUP (a media company from Russia) last year, although for some reason they remained on Six Apart’s servers. read more

I think I have just seen the future of iBlogging–and behold it looks glorious.

Called LiveJournal.app, this iPhone app was created mostly by Igrick (with some design help from Damper and Igor-Safonov) of CosySoftware, (note: link is not working as of this post) who comes from the frozen nation of Russia.

Although this app is specifically limited to LiveJournal, CosySoftware’s ingenius approach to blogging on the iPhone may force every other iBlogging app to copy their features (whether they choose to connect to LiveJournal or not). read more

Six Apart, home to the blogging platform Moveable Type, has sold off one of its core acquisitions, LiveJournal, to a Russian media company named SUP (pronounced “soup”).  Acquired in 2005, LiveJournal in many ways was a pioneer in the “social media meets blogging” intersection (now also occupied by Vox, also owned by Six Apart), and has prospered under its stewardship, tripling the number of accounts to 13 million in the intervening time frame.

You may be wondering how a blogging company will do a Russian company like SUP at its helm.

Well, earlier this year, I had written about how prolific — and important — blogging had become in Russia, where I had linked to an article which detailed the birth of Russian blogging via the LiveJournal counterpart, called Zhivoi Zhurnal.

In a place where the political and journalistic organs are not as transparent as other places in the world, coupled with a sophisticated and technologically savvy audience, it seemed like blogging had an important role to play both inside and outside politics, as a legitimate “alternative” form of journalism and media.

Whether its to organize rallies, flashmobs, or providing first hand eye-witness accounts of things, it seems like blogging has found a real purpose there, unlike the angst that some bloggers feel about its existence as a medium, here in the west.

With that kind of background, I suspect that LiveJournal is in better hands than most bloggers might be concerned about.  But time will really tell, I suppose.