Alexandra Kosteniuk keeps on looking for ways to popularize chess online, while simultaneously working on the “brand Kosteniuk”. The reigning Women World Champion (probably helped by her husband here and there) has her own website and YouTube channel and seems to be the most active Twitter user of all chess grandmasters. Update: actually Natalia Pogonina has much more followers.

For quite a while now Alexandra Kosteniuk has had her own website, www.kosteniuk.com, where lots of information can be found about the glamourous World Champion, or “chess queen”, as she likes to be called as well. This is also the name of her Twitter account, where she’s pretty active as well, as you can see.

Yesterday she tweeted:

My Magnus Carlsen video is ready… processing…then encoding… then soon uploading… You will like it but Magnus won’t!

which referred to this video, edited by her sister Oxana, about her win against Magnus Carlsen at the World Blitz Championship in November last year.

On YouTube, Kosteniuk’s account is also chess queen. More of such videos can be found there.

Update: Perhaps we gave the wrong impression that Alexandra Kosteniuk is mainly concerned with her own popularity, but in fact she’s also known for popularizing chess, especially among kids.

We haven’t come across many chess players active on Twitter yet. Some famous personalities in other sports have been using the new medium, such as Shaquille O’Neal, Lance Armstrong and Nelson Piquet. Except for Alexandra Kosteniuk, the chess world’s celebrities don’t seem ready for Twitter yet.

Perhaps this will change in 2010. There’s already a good way to play chess through Twitter and Dutch GM and ChessVibes commentator Dimitri Reinderman is even using it for book reviews! This site, ChessVibes, automatically posts links to all articles, and I’m still trying to add more “real” tweets on a regular basis, but I must admit that I’m still not used to it yet. But perhaps I can do some more during the Corus Chess Tournament which starts next Saturday.

For a list of chess fans using Twitter, look here.

Update: as David Korn noted, Natalia Pogonina has even more activity and followers than Alexandra Kosteniuk. In fact, Pogonina immediately replied to us with a tweet:

Well, what can I say? Clearly I’m still a complete layman as far as Twitter is concerned. And so I’ll just ask another question, which can be replied to with Twitter or below: which other GMs are active Twitter users?

• Tournament flyer
  
• Orientation page
• Advance entry list
• Map and driving directions
• Results and pairings (check back later)
• Fpawn Twitter page
• Photo album at Flickr