Georgia: New Media Forum
Dodie Kharkheli (aka Dodie Kissie, Dodka), Giga Paitchadze (aka Dv0rsky), Mari Talakhadze (aka Sweet), New Media Forum, Tbilisi, Georgia: Video grab © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2009
Following last year's Caucasus Bar Camp in Tbilisi, Georgia, came this week's New Media Forum supported by the Open Society Georgia Foundation (OSGF) and the Mtatsminda Park. With the Georgian blogosphere arguably the least developed in the region, the two-day event sought to evangelize the potential of new and social media to a specialist audience.
Around 200 journalists, students and social activists will gather in the amusement park on mount Mtatsminda to learn more about new media opportunities, blogging, social networks, citizen journalism, podcasting, Internet TV, contact management systems, and of course, social impact of new media.
Global Voices Online also presented at the event along with guest speakers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Poland, U.K., and the U.S. The event also launched Blogroll.ge, a portal designed to aggregate, rate, rank and populize blogs in the former Soviet republic. The forum was covered by the local mainstream TV and print media as well as by bloggers.
It also gave Global Voices Online's Caucasus Editor the opportunity to interview three of Georgia's most prominent and prolific new media advocates, Dodie Kissie (http://dodka.ge and http://ni2news.ge), Dv0rsky (http://www.dgiuri.com and http://www.face.ge), and Sweet (http://www.sweet.ge).
16 comments
Great video Onnik! I’m so used to reading bloggers’ excerpts and interviews on here, but it’s nice to be able to hear their voices and see their faces. Out of curiosity, did you shoot this video on your cell phone? Other than a little distortion on the side it’s pretty great quality.
David, yes, on a Nokia N82 phone. Also, because of the poor Internet connection in Armenia I had to down sample the video to less than half its original size in order to upload it to Vimeo.
VIVA GEORGIAN BLOGSPHERE!
But you’d rather write than talk and be more natural, guys! Smile more! :)))
Onnik, this is really good interview.
If you can send me the original video, I could upload on youtube and make some Georgian subtitles…
Liked it there, despite the sore throat and amount of talk to do with such imperfect [at the time] apparatus
Hi Sweet, Internet connection won’t allow me to email you the file as even when reduced in size/quality as it is here on this page it’s nearly 100 megabytes. However, will think on other ways of getting the file to you.
You could always upload it to dotsub and she could enter subtitles directly there. That way Lingua teams could put the video on their sites as well.
Hey this is really a good tip!
Onnik, maybe we should try this for the next time
very nice, made me want to blog :)
also i checked blogs of these three nice people, but sadly i do not speak georgian.
good luck.