In the autumn of 2004, Ukrainian politics split into two camps, and traditional media were largely dependent on owners and political forces. Television and major newspapers could not cover everything happening in the squares, and audiences sought alternative channels. The internet remained a relatively open space. As Novaya Gazeta wrote, it was there that a new practice of gathering and disseminating information took shape. The Ukrainian-speaking online audience numbered about ten percent of the adult population, and Korrespondent.net, according to Lesya Mazanik, had 70,000–80,000 unique visitors per day.
Mas spoke about his project Infostore.org, which in those weeks was a site for citizen news. Users themselves updated the feed in real time, so reports came in from many points simultaneously, without waiting for the editorial cycle. “The internet gives everyone a chance to take part in shaping the information picture,” he said, and in his view such “news from people arrives faster and more promptly than official information.”
Mirrors, live broadcasts and people from the street
The scale of engagement with the events is clear from the details Mas provided. According to him, Channel 5’s website had about twenty mirrors—copies of the same resource at different addresses that allowed readers to access material even when the main site was overloaded. One of the first to organize live broadcasting from the protests was the site. For an audience accustomed to seeing the square only on television, this was a new experience: viewers could see what was happening without intermediaries and compare different versions at the same time.
Mas himself was a man who knew Ukraine’s internet infrastructure from the inside. In 1997 he joined the National Bank of Ukraine, where until March 2000 he worked on Visa processing on the HP-UX platform. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network: the project was written in Perl in about three weeks, and costs amounted to around $100. On March 7, 2000, Mas became director of the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), founded by Aleksandr Soroka, Aleksandr Koreshkov and Aleksandr Barabash of IP-Telecom. That is why in the Novaya Gazeta text his portal was mentioned among the leaders in search results, rather than as one of dozens of small sites.
What happened to Infostore later
Infostore in December 2004 and Infostore a few years later were different projects. In April 2006, responding to ITUA readers, Mas described the site as a file-sharing service accessible via UA-IX. The news format that had seemed promising during the revolution gave way to other services. This transformation shows how quickly Ukraine’s internet environment itself was changing, with new platforms and new ways of consuming information appearing every year.
In December 2008, the Infostore story took a turn that little resembled the events of 2004. On December 4 and 5, Interior Ministry officers seized the site’s servers: 18 servers, two storage systems and a switch. The search lasted 12 hours. Later, the Ukrainian Internet Companies Association held a press conference on the case, and Mas himself in 2008 was working on the architecture of Mail.ua, a project funded by the Internet Invest group.
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