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Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.

“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told Michael Arrington at TechCrunch.

Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.

Via techcrunch

In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, mobile phone novels (keitai shousetsu) have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.”

One book, Koizora (Love Sky) about high-school girl who is bullied, gang-raped, becomes pregnant has sold more than 1.2 million copies since being released.

The mobile internet has a role in this growing phenomen in Japan, with another book Moshimo Kimiga (420,000 copies) starting with installments uploaded to an internet site and sent our to “thousands of young subscribers.”

I can’t see anyone in Western nations waking up tomorrow and seeing mobile phone composed novels on the top seller lists, but usually Japan is years ahead on many tech fronts; mobile phone data services were available and popular in Japan years ago as the rest of us are only now catching up. Perhaps the NY Times best seller list in 2012 might consist of keitai shousetsu, stranger things have happened.

This article from Techcrunch here

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me an FT article about Facebook’s Beacon social advertising app/strategy. The feelings then were mixed: the promise to advertisers was great, but would users really be happy with the invasion of privacy.

Techcrunch explains it nicely

“Beacon is a social form of advertising that shares your purchases or other actions you take on an advertiser’s site with all your friends on Facebook through their News Feeds. What has privacy advocates up in arms, and advertisers skittish, about Beacon is the way it seems to be spying on you as you surf the Web and then, on top of that, reporting what you just did to everyone you know.

This objection was doubly true when Beacon was being forced down every Facebook member’s throat whether they wanted to be tracked this way or not. And it was the main reason that MoveOn.org made killing Beacon its Cause Du Jour. Since then, Facebook has addressed most of the initial concerns by wisely forcing people to deliberately and repeatedly choose to participate. But there are still some serious issues with the way the whole system works technologically.

According to one security engineer’s analysis, Beacon partners transmit data to Facebook in bulk about members who visit their site. This is true even for those who opt out of Beacon by clicking on “No Thanks” when asked if the data can be shared with Facebook. The data is sent anyway.”

Here is a great article by Sam Sethi (Blognation) that just about sums it up from the users’ perspecive. Its all well and good having a great advertiser story, but if your users all dissappear your story counts for nowt.

A related article on Techcrunch is here

3rd Dec–> Its all kicking off!!! Here’s the latest from Mashable, more advertisers flee Facebook

4th Dec–> And more from Mashable here

From here