According to the BBC:

It is unclear who would accept the prize if the internet were to win.

Internet for Peace, set up to help support the nomination of the internet, says the prize would be “a Nobel for each and every one of us”.

Bob Boorstin, Google’s director of policy communications, said the Web search company would now be able to offer some of its other products in those countries, such as the mapping satellite software Google Earth, photo management program Picasa and Internet chat client Google Talk.

“This is a great accomplishment,” Boorstin told a human rights meeting in Geneva. “We are hopeful this will help people like yourselves in this room and activists all over the world take a small step down what is certainly a long road ahead.”

The U.S. Treasury Department said the change to existing trade sanctions was intended to help people “exercise their most basic rights” with the help of instant messaging service and e-mail.

According to this LA Times story:

With blond hair and green eyes, the 46-year-old woman bragged that she could go anywhere undetected, boasting in one e-mail that it was “an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for” jihad, or holy war, the indictment said.

“Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!” she wrote.

LaRose was arrested Oct. 15 in Philadelphia but she has not been charged with murder. The federal grand jury indictment was unsealed Tuesday. She came to the attention of the FBI in June 2008 after posting a comment on YouTube under the online moniker “JihadJane.”

In addition to dispelling notions of what terrorists look like, LaRose’s modus operandi underscores that social media can be used for productive as well as disturbing purposes.

Federal officials cited her as an example of how terrorists sometimes boldly operate inside the United States, fearless of the world watching them on the Internet.

“A woman from suburban America agreed to carry out murder overseas and to provide material support to terrorists,” said David Kris, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division. That, he emphasized, “underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face.”

Michael L. Levy, the U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, said the case shows “the use terrorists can and do make” of communicating through e-mails and videos around the world. He called LaRose “yet another very real danger lurking on the Internet.”

The other danger, authorities said, is that radical jihadists are turning to home-grown U.S. citizens to carry out their plots. “Terrorists are looking for Americans to join them in their cause,” Levy said, adding that LaRose “shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance.”

When it comes to Google Translate, those days are largely over, according to this New York Times article by Miguel Helft. According to Helft:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic translation service that the company had licensed.

The message said Google was a favorite search engine, but the result read: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!”

Mr. Brin said Google ought to be able to do better. Six years later, its free Google Translate service handles 52 languages, more than any similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate Web pages and other text.

Today when I tried translating “Google is my favorite search engine” into Korean then back again, it spat back the exact same phrase. No allusions to sushi or green onions.

The field is still growing, and online translation is not expected to be a huge moneymaker for Google. But it will have plenty of real world applications:

Because Google’s ads are ubiquitous online, anything that makes it easier for people to use the Web benefits the company. And the system could lead to interesting new applications. Last week, the company said it would use speech recognition to generate captions for English-language YouTube videos, which could then be translated into 50 other languages.

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

Still, it’s not perfect. When I tried the more complex phrase, ” I love Google. It is very handy.” I got “Google에 사랑 해요. 아주 편리합니다.,” which translated back to “Google in love. Very convenient.”

The Israeli government hopes so. They have launched a campaign that seeks to deputize all Israelis as ambassadors. It’s drawn a lot of attention, not all good. One aspect of the campaign is to teach Israelis about accomplishments of their fellow citizens so they can tell foreigners. According to the LA Times:

Many traveling Israelis encounter prejudice among misinformed foreigners and find themselves constantly engaged in arguments and defense while abroad. Now the government is offering its traveling ambassadors tips and talking points. “Together, we can change the picture,” says the website launched by the ministry of diaspora and public diplomacy, inviting people to brush up on their history, geography and current affairs to better convey their point.

Aside from providing hard facts on hard matters, the website also encourages the accidental ambassadors to make note of Israel’s impressive achievements in fields such as agriculture, technology and medicine and to encourage others to visit Israel.  It is, perhaps, a wise government that knows some of its people have shortcomings in the diplomacy department and has a few correctional tips: Listen first, then answer; keep your body-language confident and stable, and don’t move your hands furiously when you talk — it really makes people nervous.

But campaign “Explaining Israel,” meant to show that Israel is on the right side of stuff too, is already rubbing some people the wrong way, including members of the foreign press. Tired of Israel being portrayed as conflict-central and backward? Myth-Busting 101 includes a series of humorous clips that poke fun at ill-informed and stereotypical coverage of Israel. It’s not going down well.

It also seeks to dispel myths, as this YNET article explains:

One such myth: “Israel is a huge country”, and the appropriate response: “Not true. Israel is one of the smallest states in the world. India is 150 times bigger, Germany 16 times, and Italy 13 times. Israelis make up just one thousandth of the world’s population.”

Another example: “Israelis don’t really want peace,” and the suggested rejoinder: “Not true. Despite seven wars and terror that has continued for more than six decades, Israel has made huge concessions for the sake of peace with its neighbors Egypt and Jordan.”

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…

There is no one right answer to winning the war of ideas, and any solution requires bipartisan consensus.  A solid first step is establishing the Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy Caucus in the House of Representatives, which I have done with Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA).  Our goal is to bring together a bipartisan group of Representatives with an interest in waging and winning the war of ideas.  As the 9/11 Commission Report reminds us, “If the United States does not act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world, the extremists will gladly do the job for us.”  America can’t afford for that to happen.

Thornberry also introduced HR 489 on Jan. 13, 2009, to “improve the conduct of strategic communication by the Federal Government.” It was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has two co-sponsors  but hasn’t seen any action yet.

[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. . . .

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, 66, has said that he wants to use social networking to help the Pentagon interact with U.S. military members, many of whom are in their early 20s.

But opponents have cited the risks of information leaks, of opening gateways to hackers, along with a potential overload of precious bandwidth on the Defense Department’s network.

The new policy says commanders will still need to defend against cyber-attacks and block access to online pornography, gambling and sites promoting “hate-crime related activities.”

It also allows commanders to temporarily limit Internet access if the bandwidth is overwhelmed, a key caveat for U.S. forces fighting the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or stationed in remote, rugged places around the globe.

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.

The Internet is unparalleled in its power to quickly rally — and pressure — far-flung friends to participate, Green said. For example, with Causes’ popular birthday wish feature, users can ask their friends to donate money to a cause in lieu of presents. The birthday feature raises $20,000 a day for various causes.

Petitions are also effective. One petition to get insurance companies to cover genetic testing for breast cancer garnered nearly 3.5 million signatures. Causes does not take a cut of donations, but users can tip the service.

Causes also makes money from causes that are sponsored by nonprofits and others trying to reach more people, banner advertising and premium services that help nonprofits get more out of using the service.

The results: No gusher of funds for nonprofits yet, but Green has made significant progress in his quest to invent a new model for philanthropy. Causes has recruited 100 million Facebook users who have created 400,000 causes since May 2007.The median donation is $25. In all, Causes has raised $21 million for charity.

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).

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.

The approach is an unorthodox one, punctuated by such strange moments as Mr. Kutcher’s tweeted discovery of a Siberian man whose arm bore a large tattoo of his face. But it indicates how seriously Washington takes online networking as a social force.

Among the delegation’s goals was to persuade Russia’s thriving online social networks to take up social causes like fighting corruption or human trafficking, said Jared Cohen, who serves on Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s policy planning staff.

But it also references an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal by Evgeny Morozov, who isn’t so sure that social media is going to succeed where more conventional means of diplomacy have not :

While sanctions and negotiations—the well-tested ways of wielding American power—do not get us very far with China and Iran, social media as a tool of foreign policy has the unique advantage of being untested. It never failed—so it must be working.

An attempt to log on to Facebook in Iran. The screen reads in part, ‘access to this site is not possible.’

It’s easy to see why a world in which young Iranians embrace the latest technology funded by venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, while American diplomats sit back, sip tea and shovel the winter snow on a break from work, sounds so appealing. But is such a world achievable? Will Twitter and Facebook come to the rescue and fill in the void left by more conventional tools of diplomacy? Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?

This seems quite unlikely. In fact, our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.

Contrary to the utopian rhetoric of social media enthusiasts, the Internet often makes the jump from deliberation to participation even more difficult, thwarting collective action under the heavy pressure of never-ending internal debate. This is what may explain the impotence of recent protests in Iran: Thanks to the sociability and high degree of decentralization afforded by the Internet, Iran’s Green Movement has been split into so many competing debate chambers—some of them composed primarily of net-savvy Iranians in the diaspora—that it couldn’t collect itself on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Green Movement may have simply drowned in its own tweets.

Rita J. King, whose work studying how people learn about Islam in the virtual world of Second Life we have featured in a previous post, has a different take; she agrees with Morozov that “Twitter and Facebook can potentially present more harm than good when it comes to creating and executing a real revolution, but so could drawing your pistol slower back in the wild wild West.”

King adds:

While Morozov focuses on what he perceives to be an illusion of “techno-utopianism,” I would argue that the illusion runs even deeper, because even successful revolutions eventually morph into the hard reality of “now what?”

And “now what” will not be solved on Twitter or Facebook, but rather within complex platforms that foster design and simulation of better systems that benefit more human beings, which is what the #RusTechDel is attempting. The sum total of the Internet is not just social media, but also the facilitation of more thoughtful, sophisticated design of systems that will undermine human suffering and give us a greater understanding of the common bonds that make us human and ultimately give our lives meaning.

I absolutely support the ongoing development of meaningful social media and its ability to make us more complete, connected human beings. It is revolutionary in itself that Evgeny Morozov and the Wall Street Journal can get so many people thinking, talking, blogging, and musing about revolution on a Saturday morning!