With another year almost over, the annual review of events in the three countries making up the South Caucasus can be considered surprisingly positive in comparison to previous years. 2007 ended with a state of emergency declared in Georgia after opposition street protests, for example, while 2008 saw one also declared in Armenia after 10 people were killed following a bitterly disputed presidential election. The year ended with the albeit short-lived Russia-Georgia war, and 2009 was marked by the imprisonment of two video blogging youth activists in Azerbaijan. So, what did 2010 hold in store for the South Caucasus? Well, with the first deployment of new and social media in elections in the region, to the pioneering use of online tools in conflict resolution and cross-border cooperation and communication, as well as an especially positive story towards the end of the year, read on. Ethnic Armenians in the village of Tsopi, Georgia, co-inhabited with ethnic Azeris © Onnik Krikorian To begin with, the first post of 2010 on Armenian-Azeri coexistence in Georgia was also to set the main theme for the whole year, with many blog posts and analytical articles on the role new and social media could play in regional conflict resolution and transformation to follow. Both also formed the basis for participation on a panel and expert's working group at the U.S. Institute of Peace as well as a guest post for the World Development Report 2011. Contacts formed in Armenia and Azerbaijan as a result of this work also saw Global Voices’ Caucasus editor engage in outreach to potential participants from Armenia and Azerbaijan for the region's first ever Social Innovation Camp held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April. And, with local NGOs and international donors slowly starting to follow this lead, a special coverage page, Caucasus Conflict Voices, was launched and will continue throughout 2011. Another interesting development in 2010, however, was the increasing use of new and social media for non-politicized purposes. As with LGBT issues in Armenia, one example of that could be found in the form of challenging some of the more taboo subjects in the region. In particular, this meant sex, not only in general, but particularly in Georgia. Perhaps the most buzzing topic in the Georgian social media scene was not politics, elections, sport, crisis, earthquakes or catastrophe. Instead, one of the most discussed topics was actually about a new television show, Ghame Shorenastan. Shown on Imedi TV, the title translates as Night with Shorena and covers topics about sex. Nevertheless, tragedy also struck in Georgia earlier this year when luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died in accident just hours before the opening of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. Twitter users commented on the incident, while a month later bloggers were critical of a fake news report which panicked a nation still recovering from its 2008 war with Russia. On Saturday 13 March, the Imedi national television broadcaster aired a mock news report stating that Russian tanks had invaded Georgia and that the president was dead. Aired at 8pm, the usual time slot for daily news, the nation's most trusted broadcaster […] offered its audience the worst possible case scenario of what might happen a week after municipal elections scheduled for the end of May in the country's capital, Tbilisi. Of course, with another Genocide resolution under consideration in the U.S. Congress, politics did briefly rear its head, but otherwise all three countries would soon be concentrated on something else — the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest in Oslo, Norway. Moreover, unlike previous years, the international music competition was largely held without any major scandals involving acts from the Caucasus. True, politics were to materialize again soon after, but if in previous years that had been through largely politically polarized posts from government or opposition activists, the May local elections saw the serious deployment of both new and social media to monitor them. […] Considered another test of Georgia's fledgling democratization process, both deployed and relied on online and social media technologies to monitor the vote perhaps as never before during any other previous election held in the country or, indeed, the region. For much of the remaining part of the year, however, online activity continued to be defined by the non-political use of online tools. A grass-roots movement to prevent the demolition of a Soviet-era cinema to make room for the reconstruction of a church successfully used new and social media as well as traditional canvassing in the Armenian capital, for example.