The advice was addressed to the mayor of Kyiv, but it was based not on an assessment of the city's management but on observation of Chernovetsky's manner of working with the public. Mas explained his logic by the politician's character: “Chernovetsky uses a 'blue ocean' strategy, and besides, he is a very good showman.”
Chernovetsky uses a 'blue ocean' strategy, and besides, he is a very good showman.
The concept of a “blue ocean” denotes a market where there are no competitors and no need to fight through the usual competition. Applied to the internet, Mas's logic is this: a politician who knows how to attract attention can gain an audience that other candidates and officials have not yet reached. Mas named Arseniy Yatsenyuk as a model for the mayor, who, according to Mas, pays serious attention to the web.
Social networks that dissolved
The advice to Chernovetsky came in a short fragment, but the full text of the conversation covers broader ground. Speaking of political networks, Mas mentioned Yulia Tymoshenko's project “Ideal Country.” According to him, that network was made only for the election, and after it “dissolved.” Mas himself belongs to a virtual club of owners and enthusiasts of Dodge cars, that is, he participates in a community of interest rather than a political campaign.
Web 2.0 is the general name for sites where users themselves create the content: blogs, social networks, forums, collaborative services. Unlike the static pages of the internet's early years, such resources are built on feedback. For a politician, this means direct dialogue with voters without intermediaries, and it was precisely this tool that Mas advised the Kyiv mayor to adopt.
The experience of a man who built a network
Mas knows the Ukrainian internet market firsthand. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN). The first version was written in Perl, the work took three weeks, and the costs amounted to about $100. In an interview about UBN published in March 2008, Mas reported that the network shows 36 million impressions per day.
Earlier, on March 7, 2000, he became director of “Ukrainian Portal” (UAPortal), founded by a group of co-founders. In December 2004, during the Orange Revolution, Mas commented on the role of the internet in the protests. At that time his project Infostore was a site of people's news. Later it turned into a file-sharing service accessible via UA-IX. In August 2008, Mail.ua entered closed testing: Mas was the architect of the mail service, and the investor was the Internet Invest group, which put in more than $1 million.
The December search and its consequences
In the autumn of 2008, Infostore's situation sharply worsened. On December 4 and 5, Ministry of Internal Affairs officers seized the project's servers: 18 servers, two storage systems and a switch. The search lasted 12 hours. The prosecution was represented by Mykhailo Andriyenko, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs department for combating human trafficking. On December 10, a press conference of the Internet Association of Ukraine (InAU) was held, and on December 23 an interview appeared in print under the headline “Інфостор — некомерційний,” that is, “Infostore is non-commercial.”
Under these conditions, the conversation about how politicians use the network sounded anything but abstract to Mas. He was talking about people who have worked on the internet since the first years of its commercial development, and about the fact that the network can survive campaigns but does not always survive PR projects created for elections.
On April 1, 2009, the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum, the future iForum, took place in Kyiv. It was timed to the tenth anniversary of UBN, and Mas's interview, from which the item about Chernovetsky grew, became one of the materials that opened the conversation about the future of the Ukrainian internet.
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