Four mini-mini-reviews of recent and upcoming publications which scrutinize the RuNet from various disciplinary angles.

Two workshops, held in the UK next Spring, address a broad range of new-media related questions. Initiated by Natalya Rulyova & Jeremy Morris (Birmingham), our own Vlad Strukov (Leeds), and Seth Graham (SSEES), they bear the overall title New Media in New Europe-Asia. The organizers are applying for CEELBAS support and plan to publish a selection of papers in a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies. 

How does the famous padonok-jargon sound like, Ellen wondered some time ago here in the blog, when reporting on offline-meetings of the famous RuNet scumbags. Now you have the possibility to listen to the celebrity padonok number one, the founder of the website Udaff.com, Dmitrij Sokolovskij alias Udav. And wow, now slang, no mat to be met in his oral speach!

Is the Internet in Russia a political factor of 'real' significance? Or do the countless websites, journals, and blogs simulate rather than stimulate political activity and decision making? These and related questions are central in the brand new first issue of The Russian Cyberspace Journal: Virtual Power. Russian Politics and the Internet. The issue was launched this week and is fully accessible online.As the name suggests, the journal is a kin of this blog - it is published by a team of scholars which partly overlaps with this ZhZh team. In Virtual Power, they and other international specialists explore the representation and mediation of Russian political discourse - with special attention for last year's most significant political events: the presidential elections and the Georgia-Ossetia conflict. Now before turning to the contents, let me stress that we are keen on discussing these with colleagues and interested readers in this blog. Feel free to add critical comments: tell us what you like, what you miss, which questions the articles stir, with which assertions you agree, with which you don't - and if so, why you do or don't. For this first issue, we are especially keen on peeping in our readers' minds.So, what can you expect between the two virtual covers of this first journal issue? Some teasers, with links that bring you to the right articles with one mouse click. The emphasis of the issue is on social networks and participatory digital platforms - think blogs, or chatfora (Rutten, Schmidt, Goroshko/Zhigalina, Fossato). Several authors make a distinction between official media and unofficial, digitally enhanced networks (Schmidt, Strukov), and between the presentation of political events on the state-controlled television and their mediation on oppositional web sites (Lapina-Kratasiuk, Sokolova).Other contributors analyse how the Internet - that allegedly neutral, transnational medium - is used to disseminate national imagery and expressing national sensibility (Strukov, Hofmann). The issue reaches beyond the borders of the Russian Federation in analyses that consider the cases of Belarus (Krivolap) and Ukraine (Hofmann), and that position the new media developments in post-Soviet space in relation to a wider axis of what was once deemed the Second World (Saunders).Maybe you never reached this conclusion, and you are now deeply immersed in one of the articles to which the above links can take you. But in case you're still there: we hope that you'll enjoy our discussion of virtual power - and we heartily encourage you to join it here. ER