SixApart, owners of the popular LiveJournal blogging platform, have announced a partnership with the Russian media company SUP to fully localize the site for Russian users. LiveJournal is already Russia's most popular blogging community, with 4.4 million monthly visitors. Russia is also the second biggest territory for LiveJournal, but last time I checked the gap was large - the numbers from the middle of this year suggested there are ten times more Americans than Russians on LJ (3 million US users versus 300,000 Russian users, July 2006).
The improved Russian version of the site will be fully integrated with the existing service, according to a press release, and SUP hopes to improve the "usability, speed and the overall experience" for Russian speakers, as well as expanding the Russian blogosphere. The US-Russian partnership is also mirrored by the fact that SUP's co-founder Andrew Paulson is an American entrepreneur based in Russia.