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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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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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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I’ve written a lot about Facebook, which is wildly popular in the United States. But as Alec Ross, senior adviser on innovation at the State Department, noted in an interview with Kojo Nnamdi that I blogged about in a previous post, Americans tend to focus on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook because they’re popular here. To be sure, those companies have a global presence, but sometimes they’re not the main site in other countries. For example, Brazil’s population has adopted Google’s Orkut as its main social networking site over Facebook.

Steve Hamm has an article in Business Week talking about the latest social networking site with global ambitions, XIHA Life:
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Kudos to iDiplomacy symposium participant Justin Carroll for the following tip…

With millions of users, startups like Twitter and Facebook have growth and reach that would be the envy of any company. But it’s not just the private sector that can learn from those companies – the federal government can too, and a new organization, the non-partisan Expert Labs, is seeking to do just that.

As Alissa Walker writes Nov. 18 in Fast Company:

During his presentation today at the Web 2.0 conference, Six Apart cofounder Anil Dash showed a before-they-were-famous photo that included the founders of Twitter, Flickr, and other well-known startups. They’ve learned plenty of lessons as Web 2.0 companies, he said. “What if we could bring these lessons to bear in service of our country?”

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Becoming a Foreign Service officer – a prestigious position in the U.S. diplomatic corps – isn’t easy. There’s a written test and an oral test and less than 10 percent pass both. But for college students who may be curious about what it’s like to serve as an American diplomat there’s another option: the Virtual Student Foreign Service.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the creation of the program in  May 13 commencement speech at New York University:
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William May, who works out of the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs in the office of innovative engagement, spoke about some of the social media initiatives they have undertaken to engage with the world. They include:

* Official State Department social media sites — 130 Facebook pages, 50 Twitter sites, and 15 blogs. They’re also on YouTube and Flickr.
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iDiplomacy’s new media panel Monday included Adam Conner, Facebook’s DC associate manager for privacy and global public policy, Price Floyd, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for public affairs, James Fowler, author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Josh Klein, hacker of social systems, computer networks, institutions and animal behavior and Peter Marx, vice president of production and technology for Mattel.
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James Fowler, UC San Diego professor and author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, had a formative experience learning how social networks work when he went to Ecuador for the Peace Corps and helped a small town build a water system. He became frustrated after he was unable to duplicate those efforts in 29 other villages but he realized over his two years of living there that building infrastructure was not the most valuable aspect of his stint. “The real value of the Peace Corps is the connections I made with the people while I was there.”

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