Georgia: New Media Forum

Following last year’s Caucasus Bar Camp in Tbilisi, Georgia, came the 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).

Interview with Georgian bloggers from onewmphoto on Vimeo.

Georgia Today reports on the forum.

Radio Free Liberty journalist Niko Nergadze talked about a blog, which he has been running for over a year. After the lecture, he told Georgia Today that the participants were very active at the forum.

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Nergadze added that forums like these are important for Georgia as new media exists, but is limited.

“Still we are very far from claiming that the Internet and new media have a serious influence on events. But we are heading toward something,” he said.

Ruso Panozashvili, a journalist and another forum participant, agrees with Nergadze about the event’s importance.

“The importance of new media is high in Georgia where television and so-called traditional media outlets are strongly controlled,” she said. “This is not good for quality. This is why it is important to develop media with alternative tools, which in this case is new media.”

Global Voices Online’s Caucasus Editor also made a presentation at the event, and was later interviewed by the same publication.

Last week Georgia Today published a story about Media Forum, an event that took place last week in Mtatsminda Park. This week we offer an interview with Onnik Krikorian, a British-Armenian journalist and photographer based in Armenia, the Caucasus editor for Global Voices Online, and the Armenia editor for Oneworld.net. During the New Media Forum he presented the Global Voices Web site and talked about the importance of new media in the Caucasus.

Originally posted on Global Voices Online.