Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, has a guest blog on the Heritage website this week. He talks about some of the challenges of technology, such as when it is used by enemies, and a new House caucus he has set up with Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash.:

Today, we are a world away from the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially when it comes to communication.  This is largely a result of the widespread adoption of cellular technology, the proliferation of broadcast, and the advent of the Internet.  Initiatives that once served U.S. interests abroad may now hinder them.  For example, language in the Smith-Mundt Act ties the hands of U.S. strategic communicators to counter online jihadists.  Some on-air contributors to Radio Farda and Radio Liberty are prone to curious assertions that many Americans may be surprised to hear from taxpayer-funded “pro-American” radio…
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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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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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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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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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ReadWriteWeb, a blog about web technology, has a post by Richard MacManus this week about ://URLFAN, which ranks websites by popularity based on blog mentions. As MacManus explains:

We noted in our original review that ://URLFAN’s ranking list will inevitably be biased towards users of social media – and in particular bloggers. That’s a relatively small proportion of the world, however we think it’s still a useful index because social media users are highly influential. With that in mind, which websites are currently ranked the most influential on the Web?

://URLFAN is, as we write this, “currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,023,552 blog posts from 5,948,937 blog feeds.”
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One of the great cultural tragedies of the Iraq war was the 2003 looting of the National Museum, which once housed one of the world’s most impressive Mesopotamian collections.

The United States was blamed by many for not doing more to stop the looting. Now, an American company, Google, is planning to digitize the museum’s collection and make it available online, for free, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who made the announcement at the museum yesterday.
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