LiveJournal (LJ), or Zhivoy Zhurnal (Живой Журнал) / ZheZhe (ЖЖ) in Russia is a social network owned by SUP Media where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary - a wide variety of political pundits also use the service for political commentary, particularly in Russia, where it partners with the politically independent online newspaper Gazeta.ru (also owned by parent company SUP Media). As with many other social networks, a wide variety of public figures use the network. However, LiveJournal is also the name of the free and open sourceserver software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community.

LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick. Six Apart sold LiveJournal to Russian media company SUP Media in 2007, but continued to develop the site by the San Francisco-based company LiveJournal, Inc. In January 2009 LiveJournal laid off some employees and moved product development and design functions to Russia.

Bradley Joseph "Brad" Fitzpatrick (born February 5, 1980 in Iowa), is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached.

Born in Iowa, Fitzpatrick grew up in Beaverton, Oregon and majored in computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle.

LiveJournal eventually became a full-time job and then a company, which he called Danga Interactive. In January 2005, Fitzpatrick sold Danga to Six Apart, for an undisclosed sum of cash and stock. He was named chief architect of Six Apart. He left Six Apart in August 2007 and joined the LiveJournal Advisory Board in 2008. He now works for Google where he has contributed to Android, created PubSubHubbub and is now part of the Go programming language team.