On 29 October Dean of the Moscow State University Journalism Faculty Yasen Zassoursky celebrated his 77th birthday. The faculty's media-culture and communication laboratory, headed by the dean's grandson Ivan Zassoursky, presented Zassoursky Snr a very modern gift – his own blog, zassoursky.ru. The blog is interesting as it publishes not so much the usual "routine notes" associated with today's blogs, rather the childhood recollections of one of the oldest senior figures of MSU.

On 30 October, the Prof-Media holding announced the acquisition of 48.8 percent of the shares in Rambler Media Limited and concluded an agreement on the acquisition of a further 6 percent after the approval of the Russian antimonopoly authority. The Prof-Media holding, controlled by Vladimir Potanin is one of the largest of Russia's media structures. It contains the publishing houses Afisha and Komsomolskaya Pravda, several FM radio stations, including Avtoradio, and the Central Partnership film company. Early last week Rambler sold its loss-making television division Rambler TV to Prof-Media for 23 million dollars. Prof-Media General Director Raphael Akopov declared that, as a strategic investor, Prof Media plans to take Rambler to a new level of development, including "the use of mergers and acquisitions".

The online job search website SuperJob.ru, valued six years ago by its owners at $3,500 will bring in around $4 million in 2006, believes co-owner of the company Alexei Zakharov. The company is now waiting for investors who are ready to offer the opportunity to enter the European or world markets. Headhunter, another recruitment company, values the Russian Internet recruiting market at $10-15 million, but Zakharov is confident that SuperJob's turnover could top $50 million. The reason for this unanimous enthusiasm of headhunters is that American TMP Worldwide introduced Monster.com to the Russian market. It is true that at the moment Monster's Russian website just aggregates 60,000 Russian vacancies from SuperJob.ru, HeadHunter.ru, Joblist.ru and collects paid announcements.

The Corbina-TV website has launched the competition Miss-Grud 2006 [Miss Bust 2006]. By 10 November anyone can vote for an anonymous bust of a member of staff of the Corbina Telecom provider. Under the rules of the competition only adult employees of the telecom provider can take part; for those whose portfolio contains no nude pictures, the company arranges a photo-session at the office. Based on the results of the interactive voting, a top-five will be determined, and the winner of the title "Miss Grud 2006" will be sent on "an unforgettable week for two to one of the World’s most beautiful countries".

The Russian company Nival Interactive has found an investor ready to spend $20 million to acquire its Nival Online (NO) division and create a new online game. According to sources aware of the details of the deal, the investor is the owner of the Mail.ru portal. Nival Interactive was dealing with the development of the Heroes of Might and Magic V game for the French company Ubisoft Entertainment. In accordance with Finam evaluations, Nival Interactive earned $5 million in 2005 and over $10 million in the first seven months of 2006. The key developers of "Heroes" will work at Nival Online. In all the company plans to hire about 200 people by 2008. NO President Sergey Orlovsky estimates that in 2008 the number of online-players in Russia will be 4-7 million, who will spend about $8 a month just on payment for the time of the game.

Early in the week the Yandex search engine banned the indexing of the website of the famous Russian punk singer Alexander Laertsky (laertsky.com) with the wording "for search spam". The support service message states that the website "contains a large number of search queries with the sole aim of attracting traffic". It is assumed that the reason came to be the humorous section Time of the Month, where for 4 years now humorous queries are regularly published over which users find Laertsky over the Internet. A paradoxical situation is now faced as a result of the ban: when entering "Alexander Laertsky" in a Yandex search a whole host of commercial links appear to stores with Laertsky's recordings, but not the singer's official website. Fortunately, unlike the mercenary Yandex, Google and Rambler searches bring up his website first for this query.

On 25 October a spam list was registered on the Internet with the subject "ATTENTION!!! President of Russia has dead". The link from the letter supposedly leads to BBC news, but when the link is accessed one of the latest Trojan horses starts to download, Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Agent.uj. The virus enables any harmful code to be launched on the infected computer. To date this method, using "loud headlines" has been practised mostly by intruders from the West. However, Kaspersky Lab experts believe that the report of the death of the Russian president in broken English tells us the authors of the virus are Russian.

Russian internet-holding Rambler got 23 million dollars from the sale of the Rambler-TV to Prof-Media. 0.43 percent of the Russian population and 1.9 of the population of St. Petersburg watched the Rambler-TV channel. The TV channel was purchased in the interests of the 2x2 channel that belongs to Prof-Media, which will broadcast in St. Petersburg on the Rambler frequency. Despite the decent growth rate, Rambler's TV division ran at a loss. The company could direct the resources it would release to the development of its Internet projects that are losing popularity; the share of Rambler's search traffic falls year on year and just recently the company lost one of its leading IT managers.

The Federal Security Bureau (FSB) has informed the provider that hosts the website of Internet newspaper Kursiv that the activity of its editor-in-chief is undermining the principles of state. As a result the website was disconnected. The grounds for the FSB's displeasure lie in an article that criticizes the Russian president. The paper is well accustomed to prosecution; the previous provider cut its website off after the article "Putin, Russia's phallic symbol", where one of the President's theses, on the need to increase the birth rate in Russia, was depicted in a satirical vein. A criminal prosecution was brought against Kursiv's Editor-in-Chief Vladimir Rachmankov under Article 319 of the RF Criminal Code ("Insulting a representative of the authorities"). A linguistic analysis of the article was presented to the court, compiled from the point of view of an orthodox world view. According to this analysis the term "phallic symbol" is an undoubted insult.

The founder of LiveJournal.com learned of the scandal in the .ru zone, but he could not answer the questions of the Russian users of LJ owing to having no interpreter. The body of Brad Fitzpatrick was brought to Russia last week to hold a PR event to mark the acquisition by Sup-Fabrik from SixApart of the rights to service the Russian-language users of LJ.

Upon his departure from Moscow, Fitzpatrick reported in his blog that he was charmed by Russia, particularly by the episode with Frank the Goat. The symbolism of this "goat hunt" story came to the founder of LiveJournal later, when he was informed of the massive negative reaction to the deal. Fitzpatrick agreed that the Sup press conference was pointless and he promised to answer all the questions put by the Russians. However, he still didn't find himself an interpreter. Same time, the management of Sup have published a Russian FAQ with the same inarticulate answers that were given at the press conference. Remember that Webplanet raised the matter of using the language barrier to inflate Internet bubbles.