"Мы под землей не ищем", заявил глава Google Russia. Но в московском метро должны срочно появиться постеры "Гугла". Иначе "Рамблер" с "Яндексом" так и не научатся делать нормальную офлайновую рекламу.

The recent Moscow visit by Microsoft founder Bill Gates sealed the launch of a single platform for Russian-speaking Microsoft bloggers. Site administrators only prohibit the posting of anonymous comments and stress that the opinions expressed "reflect personal views and not necessarily those of the employer." The service's functionality is in line with the latest advances in blogging, such as the possibility to search across blogs, sign up for comments, export RSS feeds, perform tag searches, and suchlike. The project has been conceived as a universal platform for experience sharing among IT pros, and all blog postings display a strong corporate spirit. This favorably distinguishes the Russian-language Microsoft blogs from the Google Russia blog that features no commentaries, which makes all postings sound like advertising press releases.

The Russian Internet statistics service Rumetrics has made available materials offering insights drawn from the research of the Runet or Russian Web user community, along with a service similar to Google Trends. Now Rumetrics makes it possible to model changes in user interest in various things and phenomena. The statistics of searches handled by the Rambler search engine and the Trends statistics are calculated differently: Trends take into account queries submitted to all Rambler search services, including the special Rambler toolbar for Internet Explorer, Rambler-ICQ search, and the PDA version of the Rambler search engine.

The top prize of the Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards 2006 (Best of the Blogs) went to the US-based blog Sunlight Foundation. The best Russian-language blog award went to the community Magazeta: all about China. Vasiliy Utkin's soccer blog was named Best Corporate Blog. The two other Russian entrants were the community Old Russian Wood Architecture and the Journal of Vera Vasilyeva. The latter was nominated for a Reporters Without Borders prize but placed second, with first place shared by two blogs from Iran. Russia was represented in the BOBs-2006 jury by the noted opposition figure Marina Litvinovich, who was very disappointed by the fact that "we have been outdone by Iran."

The domain name registrar Ru-Center has recently held a public auction of the domain name Travels.ru, which started at $30 and fetched $4,000 after just three days. The famous Russian cybersquatter Pavel Gross believes that while domain name auctions are a much needed service, the Russian domain name market pales in comparison to that of the West, where countless similar marketplaces have evolved. On the other hand, the legal confusion in Russia creates more opportunities for cybersquatters. To quote Gross, who currently owns some 4,500 domain names, a Russian cybersquatter can net an average of $4,000 per month selling domain names and an additional $3,500 hosting advertisements on captured domains.

St. Petersburg State University rector Ludmila Verbitskaya and Russia's Minister for Information Technologies and Communications Leonid Reiman have recently met with the University's students to unveil plans for a real technology park in the vicinity of the University's facilities in Petergof. Five hectares of land outside the University's Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty has been earmarked for this purpose, but the estimated timeframe and funding for the technology park have yet to be approved. So far development is expected to start sometime in 2007. Much of the work to develop a construction strategy for the technology park will be handled by the company Tercom, whose president Prof. Andrei Terekhov is the chairman of the System Programming Department at the St. Petersburg State University. Major foreign companies, in particular Boeing, have expressed strong interest in building the technology park. A majority of skilled Petersburg-based IT specialists currently "work for the West", while local offices of foreign IT companies are often established on the premises of Russian universities.