Why you should run your own blog (or join a trusted community)

(Also, why you should support the EFF.)

* Between Friends: The Perils of Centralized Blogging

One of the paradoxes of current social software is how many
of your closely-guarded secrets you are obliged to entrust
to a third party. The news that LiveJournal has been sold
to SUP, a Moscow-based company, is the latest vivid
indication of this danger. Now, LiveJournal journal entries
are under the control of not only a young new company, but
a new jurisdiction: Russia. What does that mean for the
privacy of LiveJournal posts and the free expression of
LiveJournal users?

Countries like Russia have weaker protections over privacy
and free speech, both legally and culturally, than many
users might have come to expect. Legal considerations
aside, LiveJournal may come under far more intense pressure
to turn over user information or remove content when run
from Moscow than from the United States. The site is very
popular among Russian-speakers and is used by opposition
politicians there as much as by enthusiastic fan-fiction
authors. The political status of free expression in Russia
is on shakier ground, with journalists, online and off,
assaulted and threatened by the authorities.

LiveJournallers, already disturbed by previous acts of
control by Six Apart in the U.S., could well find
themselves caught up in far nastier fights over the public
and private content held by SUP's servers. That's of
particular concern for Russian users, or the many
Russian-speaking LJers in the former-Soviet republics that
surround Russia, who do not necessarily trust the political
or business culture of Moscow. Fortunately for those
concerned by the implications, LiveJournal's legacy in the
world of open source and open standards means that
extracting data from the service is not as painful as it
might otherwise be.

For the full post by EFF International Outreach Coordinator
Danny O'Brien:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/12/between-friends