While waiting for Stellvia to rip and encode for my iPod, I started looking for Russian anime blogs. Results were discouraging, to say the least: it appears that Russians have not mastered the art of animeblogging yet.

In Anglosphere, the concept of a blog is so established, that we take it for granted. A blog has permalinks and blogroll. Its content links to other blogs. The whole structure plugs into search engines to create a cross-site structure. As a result, it's enough to type "anime blog" into Google, and the results are popular anime blogs, just as expected. Following blogrolls from these results, it soon becomes apparent that about the dozen of blogs are popular: RandomC, Hop Step Jump, and so on.

Well, in Russia, it does not work. At all. Results for "аниме блог" lead with something that can be classified losely as "portals". They look very much like Danny Choo's place, and blogging as such is not their main focus.

The problem is made worse by the utter lack of links and blogrolls (with the exception of in-links at Myspace look-alike beon.ru). The only kind of linkage to be found comes as a "here's my helpful list of anime sites" type of forum posting, but those are unfocused and ephimerial.

So, a few hours later, I have Stellvia on my iPod, but no Russian anime blog worth linking. Mind boggles. What is wrong with these people?

BTW, one symptom of them Just Not Getting It is how the aforementioned lists of links dump all sorts of sites together including popular anime blogs in English (e.g. THAT, RandomC). They grok the concept of a "magazine", which they consider an electronic version of a printed magazine, but not one of "blog".