If you’re looking for background and history to make sense of the fighting between Russia and Georgia, these articles from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and associated widgets should help. You can link to any of them from your blog or Web site and your readers will get the article in its entirety. If you’re a blogger or Web publisher, of course, you’re entitled to a free subscription to Britannica Online, which will enable you to trawl the encyclopedia and the entire site for other relevant material.

• Georgia
• Russia
• Caucasus
• South Ossetia
• Abkhazia
• North Ossetia–Alania
• Vladimir Putin
• Dmitry Medvedev
• Georgia (year in review, from Britannica Book of the Year 2008)
• Georgia  (year in review, from Britannica Book of the Year 2007)

 
(Revised 8/12/08)
 

I closed my last post by introducing you to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Twitter stream. Some of you may be new to Twitter, or not even heard of it yet, so I thought I’d let you know what it is and why we’re using it to send out links and information.

Our Twitter account is: EBWebShare.

Twitter is a relatively news service that has taken many enthusiastic users of social media by storm. With Twitter, you can send a receive short messages — up to 140 characters. You receive the messages (known as “tweets”) from the people you have chosen to follow. People who opt to follow you will receive the tweets that you send out. You can send and receive over the web or over your mobile phone. The practice — which is at the heart of some other services, like Jaiku and Pownce – has come to be known as “microblogging.”

Because there are so many people “tweeting” to each other these days — often with links to interesting material — we thought it would be both fun and useful to share links and information with anyone who chose to EBWebShare. The daily link will introduce you to a topic that may have been unknown to you. Think of it as a little brain boost.

As always, we’re interested in your thoughts about our use of Twitter — is there something else we can do with our Twitter account that would be helpful? — and about WebShare in general.