Georgia: The Blogosphere emerges · Global Voices
Giga Paitchadze

The first blogs appeared in Georgia 4-5 years ago. Initially a novelty, now blogs are one of the main forms of new media in much the same way that newspapers and magazines are for traditional media. In the modern world the dissemination of news through traditional means is becoming slower than through the Internet.
Assessing the state of the Internet in Georgia is rather complicated, however, but in the near future a new service – Georgian blog catalogue will be launched. The catalogue will include all the blogs and services categorized by topic in order to simplify access to information. That will make it easier to find authors and blogs on the Internet.
The presentation of the blog catalogue is scheduled to take place in October 2009, within the framework of next week's Georgian New Media Forum. The forum will also deal with new media in general, blogs, journalism and so on. Ahead of the launch of the blog catalogue, however, a short list of Georgian blogs is available at http://blogroll.design.ge.
Until then, following analysis of the situation, the picture in Georgia is as follows:  there are over 1,500 Georgian-language blogs, a third of which are active and post at least one article per day. There are also blogs by foreign visitors to our country, but their number is not so high and at this stage are not going to be listed for review.
From our viewpoint, the most active Georgian blogs, which receive 200-300 unique visitors a day, include:
http://dodka.ge/
http://sweet.ge/
http://tomushka.blogspot.com/
http://linguistuss.wordpress.com/
http://tiny.ge/
As you can see, the topics covered by Georgian blogs is rather diverse with many bloggers mainly writing about their personal lives. However, many of them also simultaneously comment on or review political developments, the economy, theatre, music, photography or design. Nevertheless, thematic blogs on specific topics are rather rare.
However, there are blogs on cuisine, wine, military topics and so on. For example, ბლოგი ღვინისა და გემოვნების შესახებ [GE] covers wine and recipes while Military Thoughts [GE] is a blog about military theory and is rather interesting too. While there are not so many blogs of this kind, we can also mentions blogs by Gogi Gvakharia, Niko Nergadze and other journalists from Radio Liberty.
There are also blogs such as თავისუფალი სიტყვის ბლოგი [GE], whose author is an amateur Georgian journalist. In the future our rubric is to review such popular blogs to raise public interest and awareness of the authors and blogging in general.
The original unabridged version of this article on the blogosphere in Georgia first appeared in Georgian, Russian and English on Media.ge.