A look back at South Ossetia

Global Voices point us to Live Journal user photomans with photographs from Tskhinvali and a refugee camp in Vladikavkaz. They’re from mid-August, but have not been circulated throughout western media as far as I can tell. There are the, by now, familiar appeals from journalists who know no other way of contacting bloggers in the comments,

I am journalist and producer for Bluepress photowire and video agency : bluepressagency.com We want to sell your pictures from Ossetie, for French magazine and news paper and american press. Could you send us you e-mail/ phone number? Could you make legend (captions) of the pictures. link

Meanwhile, Global Voices also talks about how Russians and Georgians interacted in the blogosphere during the recent war in Georgia and South Ossetia. Ethan Zuckerman has a good round up on the failings of the blogosphere and how, according to a Belarussian journalist called Evgeny Morozov, it can sometimes be difficult to verify the authenticity of a blog, especially a blog that suddenly appears out of nowhere,

Besides the scarcity of blog accounts from the ground, Morozov is concerned with their veracity and reliability: “Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.”… There’s a wealth of blogs that claim to give eyewitness reports of the conflict, and these eyewitness reports tend to strongly favor one interpretation of events over another. link