Remember the early days of online foreign language translation when translating a phrase from English to a foreign language then back to English was as entertaining as turning on Facebook’s Pirate mode?

When it comes to Google Translate, those days are largely over, according to this New York Times article by Miguel Helft. According to Helft:
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The Pentagon’s selective ban on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites is being lifted for its non-classified network, according to a Reuters article in the Washington Post:

[I]t could mean big changes for large portions of the armed forces, including the Marines, which had selectively banned social media on work computers.

The Department of Defense also had bans in place since 2007 on accessing certain bandwidth-gobbling Web sites like YouTube on its network. . . .
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The LA Times has a profile today of Joe Green, founder of Facebook application Causes, which facilitates  giving of time and money to favored causes:

How it works: Facebook users install a program called Causes. Facebook friends band together to solicit donations, promote advocacy and spread awareness for a cause.
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Google has created a website for people searching for information about people as well as people who have information to share.  It’s available in English and Spanish.

Similar to the Haiti earthquake, those seeking to donate by text have a variety of options, according to CNET:

As with the Haiti relief effort, donations can also be made via text message, according to the Mobile Giving Foundation, the organization that processes the donations. Cell users can make a $10 donation to the effort by texting the word “Chile” to any of the following numbers: 25383 (Habitat for Humanity), 20222 (World Vision), and 52000 (Salvation Army).

The New York Times has a story on the State Department’s trip to Moscow, with various social media honchos in tow, along with Twitter King Ashton Kutcher. They’re calling it “geek diplomacy”:

This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.
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TechCrunch has a post on the latest State Department/private sector trip to practice “21st Century Statecraft.”

Prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) is going, along with Jack Dorsey (@jack), founder of Twitter and the Square, plus a variety of State Department officials — including policy planning staffer Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen) and White House CTO Aneesh Chopra.  Cohen lead a similar trip to Mexico last year.
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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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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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