Last week I presented each of you with a challenge. Take a look at your slice of the world and tell me how web technology has effected it.

I received a number of really good responses, over the next few days I’ll show you some of the best.

This one comes from Svetlana Gladkova, founder of Profy and Russian Internet Entrepreneur.

From Russia With Web

So I am from Russia (Novosibirsk is the name of the city).

I use the web for my work all the time that I am not sleeping. As an internet marketer I use all the services that can be of use – social networks, online office and various online applications. As a blogger I also follow lots of news sources (and hundreds of blogs) and write blogs myself.

In my country internet is very utilitarian – people mostly use the web to receive emails and stay in touch with their friends and family. Also internet search is important here – people mostly perform searches for their job functions and when they choose, compare and evaluate products to buy (the percentage of people actually buying anything online is rather low, with the only exception of the capital city – Moscow).

Web 2.0 tools are hardly used at all by an average Russian user, often because of the internet traffic price which is incredibly high here. The most popular blogging platform here is LiveJournal followed by several local services. The majority of people blog about their daily tasks and events, only a handful of people blog about professional topics and try to earn money blogging.

It is also important that in Russia web developers often prefer to clone US web services and websites for the Russian users instead of inventing something of our own. But still more and more startups are launched and they start to compete for the Russian audience.
In general, we have lots of space for development here and it depends largely on the infrastructure, especially the traffic prices.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Thanks to Svetlana for taking the time out to answer this question. I would love to hear from the rest of you. What is the web like where you are from? How has the Internet become a part of your culture?

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