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 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 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 world's largest Internet transaction took place in Russia, reports the "Business" newspaper. The SETonline trading platform held the largest auction using electronic signature, as a result of which an annual contract has been signed for provision of services to clean premises and provide technical maintenance to the buildings of the Centertelecom company. In the course of the bidding, the price of the contract was reduced by 4.2%: from 121 million roubles (over $4.5 million) to 116.2 million roubles. E-auctions are lucrative for the company, states General Director of OJSC Centertelecom, Sergey Pridantsev: when concluding contracts online you can save up to 40%. SETonline is now the only platform that uses electronic digital signature. A number of Russian laws endow electronic digital signature with legal force and regulate its use.

In her report to the conference "The problem of spam and its solutions", head of the Kaspersky Laboratories analytical group Anna Vlasova voiced an ironic phrase on an attempt to introduce the "25th frame effect" into spam mailings. The agency Itar-TASS took this idea in full seriousness to the wider public: "a high-frequency advertisement clip acts on the subconscious of the user, forcing him to remember the ad, where the frames often contain the English word "buy"". This news amazed a whole section of the mass media, while in some the media virus grew to the status of "a new form of electronic weaponry". In actual fact, as Vlasova clarified in an interview with Webplanet, additional frames in animated spam mailings are only "an attempt to alter the file signature and complicate the identification of takes, under which a message could be defined as spam".

Yandex, in cooperation with Nokia, has released a search plug-in for the Mobile Search programme, which is distributed free of charge and which operates on all Nokia mobile devices on the Series 60 platform. It is true to say that the user has to get through a reasonably tough quest to install the programme. "Nokia today actively maintains an audience of mobile users on the Internet. Now they are met there by Yandex", explains Alexei Tretyakov, Commercial Director of the search engine. Alas, though, it is in fact not quite like that: first of all the audience is met by the Yahoo! search engine. Only then, after running the separate plug-in, installing and setting it up, can you actually get to Yandex.

The Russian company Akella has concluded an agreement with two foreign gaming companies, RTL Playtainment and Strategy First to release several projects of these foreign companies in Russia and the CIS. Among the unusual projects, one highlight is the game Zoom - Paparazzi im Einsatz, which is simulator of journalistic activity. The main aim of the game is to photograph intriguing and delicate situations. Obstacles come in the form of nightclub bouncers, bodyguards of the targets and much more.

On Wednesday 8th November, the 4th international conference "The problem of spam and its solutions" was held in Moscow, organized by Kaspersky Laboratories and Mail.ru. The interesting reports made to the conference including the appearance of Victor Naumov, partner in the legal firm Beiten Burkhardt. He believes that Russia does not have an extensive law-enforcement practice relative to spammers, in connection with the emergence of a new federal law "On advertising", which has been almost unused in relation to spammers. The more "technical" reports discussed new methods to combat spam, including advanced versions of the "Turing Test". On the whole the conference concluded that spam was inevitable.

Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft, visited Moscow on a business trip. During the visit there were a number of meetings with the First Deputy Prime Minister of the RF Dmitry Medvedev, the RF Minister of Information Technologies and Communications Leonid Reiman and the RF Minister of Education and Science Andrey Fursenko. Gates also presented reports to the annual Microsoft Business Forum 2006, he appeared at a seminar with leading experts in innovation and IT, and a seminar with young entrepreneurs and scientists.

"The last time I came to Russia was in 1997, and I did not expect to see such considerable changes", noted Gates. "I was simply delighted at the volume of discussion in which I was able to be involved today with representatives of Russian business and senior government officials. Russia has become economically stronger and this creates a good springboard to move the country on the way to the development of an innovative economy".

Today the RF State Duma adopted, in its second reading, the fourth part of the Civil Code, to which over a thousand corrections have been received. An important correction that has been adopted is the exclusion of a domain name from the list of protected objects of intellectual property. Previously the draft legislation proposed that it be required of the register to check the domain being registered against existing similar company or commercial names. Nevertheless, problems do remain, as the current version of the draft legislation all the same contains mention of domains. In particular, the registration of a trademark is not permitted if a similar name exists in a domain name.