On Saturday, I was ranting a little about the little publicized conflict brewing between Georgia and Russia (through Abkhazian separatist proxies). I also mentioned that there was footage available of a Russian Mig29 shooting down a Georgian recon UAV. There are further Abkhazi claims concerning the downing of six other UAVs, but these are denied by the Georgian government.

The video below includes this footage, as well as discussion and a presentation of the evidence of Russian involvement by a Georgian officer.

I think this conflict will prove quite interesting - it's the first time I can recall in a while that a major power other than the US has bullied another sovereign nation in such an obvious way. It seems that Georgia is actively seeking international attention for this conflict, presumably because they can't hope to win militarily against Russia, and therefore are hoping for a diplomatic victory. By testing the willingness of the UN, US and EU to confront Russia over this, this conflict has the potential to shed light on the current balance of international power.

I'm getting my news on this conflict through the trawlings of Chirol at Coming Anarchy. Has anyone seen much other news of this? A quick review of Google News reveals little..

via George

You may have heard me rant about these in the same breath as cochlear implants, but, well, seeing is believing. Video contains a news article about bionic eyes being implanted into fully blind patients in the UK; current versions provide an image of about 30 or 60 pixels directly through electrical stimulation of the optic nerve.

I've been sitting in on Robert Kraut's online communities course. He's a visiting lecturer from CMU with a background in social psychology, and consequently the course is heavy on theory and empirical studies. In it, he discusses how theories of social psychology can help us understand and build online communities.

So far, we've covered community structures, motivations for contribution and ways of encouraging it, the ways in which newcomers assimilate into the community, and the ways in which relationships can form within a community. We've also talked a little about groups within communities, for example as sources of motivation and social loafing, shared identity and discrimination.

Recently, while talking about the last of these, discrimination, someone mentioned 'Blue Eyes / Brown Eyes', a lesson taught by a teacher, Jane Elliot, to classes of 3rd graders in Iowa during the years following Martin Luther King's assassination. In it, she teaches them about discrimination by dividing them into brown and blue eyed groups, then praising one group and criticizing the other.

While slowly uploading 3 years of email archives to gmail this afternoon, I spent a while poking about random video blogs following links from last week's Epic-FU. While the content is amusing, it's the fact that they even exist that really interests me - random people creating not only content, but regular shows, of quality at least the same as I'd expect from regional TV. It's been said for some time that the internet facilitates a massive democratization of culture, but you don't really get that as a gut feeling until you go out* and dig around.

It's really quite heartening. There's a real golden age going on - a huge diversity of people picking up tools, making some stuff, and change the world. There's a directness and apparent honesty to the content that's really appealing. Even though a lot of it's fairly low brow, that's OK - it's usually deliberate, and you don't get the feeling that you're being condescended to by a media conglomerate that's decided you (as part of the great unwashed) are insufficiently intelligent or attentive. And that's not to say that it's typically low brow - there's some really great, really thought provoking content out there, too..

Anyway, vector - Epic-Fu is a 5 minute weekly that covers pop internet culture. Episodes usually contain a mix of music, pop culture video links and notes about cool new web tools, as well as the occasional WTF? - one episode a couple of weeks back, for example, was interspersed with 'FUnetics', a Scientology spoof with a weird alternate reality web game attached to it.

One last thing - I stumbled across For Your Imagination somewhere this morning; it's a startup aiming to provide production services to people wanting to run video casts of their own. This, too, is pretty heartening, and it'll be interesting to see how this works - it seems to be focused on providing a service to creators rather than exploiting them as current media conglomerates do. Of course, what matters is how the service matures. Anyway, check out their demo reel on the site's front page. Make sure you give it time to load, though - if the video isn't fully downloaded, it just stops playing and goes back to the beginning.

* By 'go out', what I really mean is sit in front of your computer and click some of the buttons** you haven't clicked before.
** By 'click buttons', what I really mean is click the button on your mouse while holding it in a particular place on your desk, following a sequence of similar actions that have placed your your mouse cursor over a particular shape on your screen***.
*** As a complete aside, the layers of abstraction in the words we use to describe our behaviour on the internet are totally fascinating, don't you think? I wonder if you could judge depth of change by the average depth of indirections between the metaphors used to describe typical actions and the literal meaning of those words. Internet life is at least at depth three or four..