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" ESQ: You&amp;#039;re probably the most famous blogger in Russia right now, and you&amp;#039;ve become a leading figure in the opposition to Vladimir Putin. How did you get started? Alexei Navalny: For a long time, I worked in the Yabloko party [one of the political parties in Russia]. I was responsible for political events, and my goal was to attract journalistic attention to them. At some point, I realized the media that asked me for political commentary usually had a smaller audience than my own personal blog [Navalny.LiveJournal.com; written in Russian, without translation]. So I focused on that and started to blog about corruption. Of course, there is television, which pretty much doesn&amp;#039;t notice or mention me, but I developed an attitude: They ignore me, I ignore them. The only reason my blog exists is censorship in the media, and if there weren&amp;#039;t any, lots and lots of ordinary journalists would write about the stuff I write about, and my blog just wouldn&amp;#039;t be interesting to anyone. That&amp;#039;s generally one of the major differences between Russian blogs and European and American ones. ESQ: How much has the Internet influenced the recent protests in Moscow? AN: I think about 40 percent of the people came to protest mainly because of the Internet. The past year, year and a half, was very important in this respect: Broadband became cheaper and the mobile Internet spread dramatically. The Internet has become a true information infrastructure in big cities \u2014 and can now even challenge TV [in its influence]. Social networks gave us some very much needed infrastructure, and different services are useful in very different ways. LiveJournal is good for informational, more detailed posts. Facebook has more multimedia features \u2014 likes, links, posters, videos, events \u2014 where you can see if your friends are going to this and that rally or not. But the people didn&amp;#039;t go out on the streets because of Facebook or LiveJournal \u2014 it&amp;#039;s because they were angry. If it weren&amp;#039;t for this informational infrastructure, they&amp;#039;d go anyway, but it would be harder for them to coordinate their efforts. Now, since everything is easier to organize, the protests are more peaceful. \u2014Dmitry Golubovsky, editor in chief, Esquire Russia "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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