WHEN the British government established the Longitude prize in 1714, offering a cash prize for a simple and practical way to determine the position of ships at sea, it was ahead of its time. Rather than funding a single research scientist to solve the problem, it adopted an approach that has lately become known as “crowdsourcing”.  

While the real war between Russia and Georgia may be over, the Internet war lingers on, with virtual battalions continuing to fight on sites like YouTube.

The point of contention is a short clip of a Fox News program, in which Shepard Smith, the host, interviewed two South Ossetians: a 12 year-old-girl from Walnut Creek, Amanda Kokoev, and her aunt, Laura Tedeeva-Korewiski, who happened to be in the region when the war broke out. The interview went fine until she blamed Georgia for the war. Smith, in a rather abrupt manner, interrupted and asked for commercial break - only to have the aunt call on the Georgian government to resign when they returned on air. “That’s exactly what Russians want,” whispered Smith, as he cut them off again - this time forever.

…Don’t get me wrong: My geopolitical sympathies, if anything, lie with Moscow’s counterparts. Nor do I see myself as an Internet-savvy Rambo character. I had a much simpler research objective: to test how much damage someone like me, who is quite aloof from the Kremlin physically and politically, could inflict upon Georgia’s Web infrastructure, acting entirely on my own and using only a laptop and an Internet connection.

Full story here.

here’s the teaser:

When a few years ago Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and one of the chief proponents of citizen journalism, tried to describe the fundamental shift in the balance of power between the media and the public caused by blogs and other forms of user-generated content, he famously spoke of “the people formerly known as the audience”. “[They] are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable”, he stated in a rather solemn tone.

Call me elitist, but I never fully embraced the notion that this great unwinding of reality, fiction, and predictability merited that much celebration. Watching the information wars of the last few months-first in China in the aftermath of the Tibet and the Olympics protests and now in Russia in light of its war with Georgia ands its coverage in the Western media-I couldn’t help but wonder if Rosen fully understood all the implications of his otherwise spot-on diagnosis..

read more here.

It started as a fairly predictable digital conflict, mimicking the one in the real world and displaying no shortage of “conventional” cyberwarfare: Web pages were attacked, comments were erased, and photos were vandalized. A typical prank on the Georgian Foreign Ministry’s Web site visually compared Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili with Adolf Hitler.

As Russian tanks lumbered southward over mountainous Ossetian terrain, Russian netizens were seeking to dominate the digital battlefield…

Continued here.