Ever wished that visiting a doctor was as easy as sending a text message?

An in-person consultation will always be best for some ailments, but sometimes it isn’t feasible. A San Francisco start-up, Truth on Call, has rolled out a service that lets people text questions to physicians, then collects the answers.

It’s not cheap — $50 to get a reply from one doctor, with the responding doctor receiving 10 and the rest covering text messaging fees and payment to Truth on Call.  And they foresee the uses as going far beyond just patient and doctor. The New York Times has more:
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Check out this handy Creativity article on how new media is helping the rescue and relief efforts in Haiti. Among the initiatives Tali Krakowsky cites are:

Ushahidi is an open source project which allows users to crowdsource crisis information to be sent via mobile. They have created a Crisis Map of Haiti in collaboration with International Network of Crisis Mappers. The map represents a comprehensive and up-to-date crisis overview for to the humanitarian community.
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Ernest J. Wilson,  dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC and a university fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, has a thoughtful piece in the Huffington Post on the ramifications of Google’s announcement that it may withdraw from China, and how it may affect not just China but also U.S. foreign policy:

A consequence of the digital economy’s timidity is that the U.S. foreign policy agenda has not changed very much in substance or tone. But now, if other major content producers follow Google into the ring, the strategic and diplomatic gravity of big Silicon Valley firms may finally match their economic weight. Of course, traditional matters like military strategy, state-to-state diplomacy and the like will always remain important elements of a nation’s statecraft. But moving forward we may see a couple of changes that suggest we have reached an inflection point.
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Google Translate is helping to overcome language barriers online with its free online translation of texts, web pages and documents, and it’s progressed a long way since the early days of Babel Fish with its sometimes hilarious, nonsensical “roundtrip” translations. But the web is also facilitating language learning in a way that doesn’t require sitting in a classroom. As Eric A. Taub notes in a New York Times article, “The Web Way to Learn a Language“:
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OhMyGov! has a post by Amelia Hassani on the six top government social networking sites: Military.com, Govloop, ExchangesConnect, GovCentral, Our Border and The Federal Contractor Network.
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Over $2 million has been raised through mobile phone giving for earthquake aid in Haiti, according to the New York Times Lede blog. Awareness of the different ways to donate — text “Haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross or “YELE” to 501501 donate $5 to Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s charity — has been helped by word-of-mouth publicizing on Facebook and Twitter:
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Expanding on the Democracy Video Challenge, the State Department launched a Twitter contest today.

The U.S. Department of State announces the launch of the global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest. Tweet what you think democracy is using the hash symbol: #democracyis. The goal is to provide a worldwide platform in which people can discuss the meaning of democracy and exchange ideas from diverse perspectives.

The global “Democracy is…” Twitter Contest begins today at 5:30 p.m. EST and ends January 21, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. EST. To join the contest, become a Twitter follower of @demvidchallenge and tweet what you think democracy is in 140 characters or less. The contestant whose tweet with the greatest number of unique re-tweets will receive a Flip Video HD Camcorder. The winner will be announced on the Democracy Video Challenge Facebook fan page ^[1] on January 25, 2009. Only one re-tweet per user will count in the official tally. Additional contests will be announced throughout the year.

Marc Lacey of the New York Times has an article about Revolico.com, a site set up by two Cubans living in Spain to facilitate Craigslist-type exchanges. The similarly bare bones site is helping to facilitate black market entrepreneurship:

Two Cubans in their 20s who left the island for Spain have created a way to make all this secretive selling easier. It is a type of Cuban Craigslist, which allows the small but growing number of Cubans with access to computers and the Internet to buy and sell with less sneaking around.

But the authorities, despite loosening restrictions recently on the sale of computers, have repeatedly blocked access to their Web site, Revolico, whose name means commotion. One of the programmers who created the site (www.revolico.com) said in an e-mail message that he and the co-founder were in a constant scramble to get their site past government censors.
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The Washington Post has a follow-up story about a woman, Mia Fleming, who recently reconnected with Chris Astle and Emily Yanich-Fithian — friends who found her as an abandoned baby two decades ago.

An initial article on Dec. 17 describes how the then-15-year-olds found her and how Mia later found them:
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Helle C. Dale of Heritage Foundation has just written a report on the U.S. government’s use of social networking in public diplomacy. The full report can be viewed here.
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