Elections, if not democracy, spread to LiveJournal

SECOND LIFE, May 29 (Reuters) – Online democracy is on the march.

Blogging service LiveJournal.com is currently holding elections for two seats on its advisory board. Election winners will participate in quarterly conference calls with executives from Russian media company SUP, which owns LiveJournal, and be flown to an annual meeting in Istanbul to discuss issues relating to LiveJournal’s administration.

LiveJournal’s democratic elections of user representatives closely parallels recent elections in CCP’s EVE Online, in what may be a growing trend among new media companies with loyal but contentious user bases.

LiveJournal is a blogging and social networking service that grew quickly from 2001 to 2004, before becoming eclipsed in popularity and media buzz by sites like MySpace and Facebook. About 1.8 million LiveJournal accounts are active “in some way,” according to company statistics.

The service was founded by Brad Fitzpatrick in March 1999, who committed LiveJournal to open-source practices. Citing a desire to work on new projects, Fitzpatrick sold LiveJounal to blogging company Six Apart in January 2005. Six Apart found most of LiveJournal’s new growth coming from former Soviet countries, and sold the service to Russian media company SUP in December 2007.

It remains unclear what influence, if any, elected LiveJournal representatives will have. The user representatives will join an existing advisory board that includes Fitzpatrick and notables such as First Amendment scholar Lawrence Lessig.

The current board has complained SUP ignored their input in the past. In March, SUP stopped offering its basic account, a free blog with a minimal feature set and no advertisements. Fitzpatrick protested that the Advisory Board had no input on the decision.

“Brad’s pissed. I’m pissed,” wrote fellow LiveJournal advisory board member Danah Boyd on her blog. “Not only because we both vehemently disagree with this change, but because they made such a change without consulting us.”

SUP executives chalk up the previous dust-ups to learning pains as it experiments with a new model for setting policy. The company apologized to Fitzpatrick for not consulting the advisory board on the change, said SUP’s Benjamin Wegg-Prosser in a phone interview with Reuters, and made a public commitment to reversing the policy.

As of today, LiveJournal still does not offer basic accounts.

Regardless of the impact that elected representatives will be able to make, LiveJournal’s core users remain essentially a captive audience.

“I’m taking a wait and see approach to the new board,” said LiveJournal user Becky Zoole of St. Louis. She organized a one-day “content strike” in March to protest the elimination of basic accounts.

But Zoole acknowledged that even if elections don’t bring the greater transparency to LiveJournal’s adminstration she hopes for, she is unlikely to leave the service.

Fifteen bloggers are vying for one seat reserved for Cyrillic-language users of the service, and another 23 users are contesting for a second seat reserved for Latin-alphabet languages like English or German.

“For future changes that will have a significant impact on the user base it’s inconceivable we wouldn’t talk to the Advisory Board,” SUP’s Wegg-Prosser said. “We didn’t set this up just to ignore them.”