Forecast of four future segments of Russian blogging - the fourth is preferred

From here (sorry for the imperfect translation):
http://hasid.livejournal.com/986075.html

"...It is easy to predict what will happen to Russian LiveJournal in 3 years – by year 20012. Russian LJ will consist of 4 segments, with almost no overlapping.

The first segment will consist of public officers and their teams (everything as at Mironov’s who is a brave man who publicly disclosed the mechanism of this activity). Some will have smaller teams, anothers will have at their disposal larger teams, depending on the rank (the “young” President Medvedev’s LJ team, for example, consists of 12 persons). But all the officials from the mayor of the town and above will be obliged to do blogging.
That is, in this segment there will be a total of tens of thousands of accounts (and respectively, 3-4 times more "blogging Negroes” who will actually manually type phrase and comments of what officials would say and "to monitor the blogosphere". Perhaps in this case Russia will invent a new kind of welfare in the world and employ here tens of thousands of clerks). It is clear that these people are not used to and will never get used to speak on equal terms with the nation - in this case with us, ordinary people-bloggers. So, here we shall see tightening the screws. i.e. to censor LJ somehow, to use the Article 282th of the Criminal Code, etc.
(Russian LiveJournal businessmen - from the top: medium to large can be included into the same segment; a person like Chemezov via hands of his PR deparmtent will tell everybody how to live and work).

The second segment - is "ours Petrosyan-like” (Russian-Armenian public low-level humourous artist), what is now called "blogs for hamsters". The examples are the LJs of Lebedev, Tinkov and others like they. It can be compared with today's Russian TV programs like Comedy Club","Dom-2"and other serials like" Ranetki " and in the printed media - the Russian newspapers "Life", ”KP” and other yellow newspapers. Practically, it is cyberpunk.

The third segment - is a "platypus". This corresponds to approaches of small and medium businesses in the real Russia-2009: "to steal the idea in the West and adapt it to Russia," or “to capture the old Soviet enterprise and squeeze everything out of it without reserves" etc. But this segment may have high quality Russian LiveJournal blogs (with an adjustment that the network audience still qualitatively higher than in the corresponding auidience of Russia-2009). Someone, indeed, will exploit "platypus" in the following manner: 1 ad per 1-2 interesting and "working" blog post. Someone starts blogging as clippings (like the current blogger Drugoi) and will post not just "hot" photos, but something found in the archives, to complement their own research. Another will buy antique books and post their scans, etc. But overall, I think the ratio of “working bloggers” and “add to the friend list for food” be 1:1000 or even more (the same ratio as the ratio between “quality” and "junk" mass media in Russia-2009 or between innovative small and medium-sized enterprises and the typical Russian “sucking money” business).

Finally, there will be marginalized "honest men" niche of bloggers - this is the fourth segment. These will be blogs of those persons who are neither officials, nor cyberpunks, and nor businessmen. And every month their share will diminish – some shall crawl over to Verbitsky’s blog, or to any other community (in Russia-2009 it corresponds to "emigrate"), others shall go to work as "blogging Negro" for an official (who has gone into the power - to lift Russia from the knees"), or shall become a "platypus" ("it-is-necessary-to- get-money-for-life!"). Those who ill stay in ghetto shall squabble with each other, receiving "from experience" stomach ulcer, stroke, and finally the coffin. Just a small portion shall go to the extreme escapism (from crafting kids toys to other unusual habits).

All of this does already exist here and now, but while these segments are still connected by some thin threads, illusions "about the future" are alive.