It's 10 days till we launch Video Republic - a look at what it means to live in a world where just about anyone with basic video recording equipment and an ok internet connection can make and distribute our most instantaneous and powerful form of media - the moving image. Internet videos, produced by us, are part of the evolution of free speech - changing how we see each other, our behavioral norms and our relationship to leaders. They are above all, a new place for public deliberation. So anyway, putting the eulogy to one side, I'm going to post 10 interesting stories about this kind of thing, that we stumbled across in researching this report. Hope you enjoy it.

1. Citizen Journalism in Lebanon

For 33 days between July and August 2006 targets throughout Lebanon were bombed by the Israeli airforce. Many of these attacks, particularly those that fell on Beruit were documented by people on their mobile phones and uploaded to video sharing websites. The videos opened an intimate and instantaneous window on a controversial conflict which displaced hundreds of thousands of people throughout Lebanon, giving viewers all over the world new insights into what it is like to be on the front line of a modern war. In some of the videos you can here people laughing in the background, in others people are crying. The recent conflict in South Ossettia and Georgia has also been documented in a similar way. Standing in line behind the poets of the Great War, the photographers in Vietnam and the TV cameras that rolled into Iraq on American tanks, the videos from Lebanon show the Video Republic’s ability to depict war in a new light to people around the world.

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