A New Life for LiveJournal

My colleague Alexey Maykov has just alerted me to the news that LiveJournal is to be acquired by SUP:

Six Apart, the world's leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities. SUP has launched an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

To a certain group of individuals, the first question to be asked is: what will happen to LiveJournal updates, currently a part of the SixApart atom stream?

The big picture here is that firstly LiveJournal is a huge part of the blogging scene in Russia (Moscow, essentially) and secondly, it is not clear quite how to keep growing the thing in a way that brings in the big bucks. Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, will be speaking at ICWSM next year in Seattle.