Moore said she would like to see laws increase the penalties for sex traffickers and also secure greater funding to help rehabilitate victims. She has been working with the Department of Homeland Security on the issue and that she and Kutcher are currently working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking too, according to this Politico story.

Moore and Kutcher are working on a public service announcement about sex trafficking and she wants to see increased penalties for offenders and more funding for victims. And, according to Politico, they’re enlisting social media to help the cause too:

The actress said she is also helping to put together a task force called the DNA (short for Demi and Ashton) Trafficking Tech Task Force which will include “some of the brightest minds of Silicon Valley” –from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Craigslist” — to help with the issue.

“Technology has enabled the problem, but technology can be used to solve the problem,” she said in the interview. “For those abusers and predators online, they better watch out. We’re looking to expose the anonymity by which they are taking comfort.”

The DNA Foundation (@DNAFoundation) launched Jan. 25.

According to the BBC, his first tweet translated to: “Hey how’s it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I’m off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!”

In addition:

A close aide, Public Works Minister Diosdado Cabello, announced . . .  that Chavez supporters planned to “storm” social networking sites.

“The opposition thinks it owns the social networking sites – they think Twitter and Facebook belong to them,” he said.

“We’re fighting and there are seven million of us who will have Twitter,” he declared, referring to the membership claimed by Mr Chavez’s United Socialist Party.

Chavez has close to 200,000 followers, and he has, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, invited Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales to join as well:

“The potential this has … it’s not capitalist, it’s not socialist, it depends on how it is used,” he said after posting two messages on his page @chavezcadanga.

//

“I invite Evo and Fidel,” Chavez said. “Evo – are you on Twitter? Let’s invite Evo to Twitter,” Chavez said during a visit to a cattle ranch with Bolivia’s president.

Both Morales and Castro are close allies of Chavez and the three men are Latin America’s most vocal critics of what they call the U.S. empire. . . .

Many Venezuelans laughed when Chavez announced he would join Twitter, wondering how their famously verbose leader, who speaks almost daily for hours on end, will keep to the service’s 140-character limit.

Chavez’s page name includes “candanga,” which translates locally as a rebellious or strong-willed person.

A couple relevant excerpts:

For a lot of people in the media, tweeting is almost obligatory. Why not for you?

There’s only so much you can do in a day. And I don’t feel I lack for platforms for expressing myself. I have books, I write for the New Yorker. If I gave people any more, they’d get sick of me. . . .

A Facebook group with 200,000 followers – is that an illusion of mobilization?

It depends on what you’re trying to do. If I’m putting together a flash mob, that I want everyone to meet me in half an hour in Times Square, it’s really useful to have 100,000 followers on Twitter. If I want everyone to go to my website and buy my new book, it’s incredibly useful to have 100,000 followers on Facebook. If I want to start a political movement to overthrow a tyrannical regime, it may be less useful. If you follow me on Twitter, I do not own your heart. I may own your pocketbook momentarily. And I may own your attention for five seconds, but that’s it.

In The Tipping Point, you talk about ideas spreading just like epidemics. Do social media accelerate that spread?

Do ideas spread through social media? I don’t think they are vehicles. People aren’t spreading ideas on Twitter, they’re spreading observations, perhaps. The point of Tipping Point is that I was very interested in face-to-face interpersonal reactions. If social media or online communication is the means to the creation of a personal connection, it’s a fabulous thing. But if it’s an excuse to not make a connection, it’s ultimately a trivial thing.

Google and other major American Internet companies like Yahoo and eBay failed to gain significant traction in the Chinese market. And Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the government.

Instead, the hottest companies in the world’s biggest Internet market have names like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba — fast-growing local firms that are making huge profits. Post-Google, China’s Internet market could increasingly resemble a lucrative, walled-off bazaar, experts say. Those homegrown successes, however, could have trouble becoming global brands.

“If the Chinese government continues to favor domestic companies, those companies that reach critical mass could become phenomenally profitable,” said Gary Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures, an American venture capital firm with investments in China. “But it may be hard for those companies to become world class without outside competition.” . . .

The story behind the success of these companies is a simple one, some analysts say. The young people who dominate Web use in China are not just searching for information; they’re searching for a lifestyle. They are passionate about downloading music, playing online games and engaging in social networking.

“Sixty percent of the Internet users here are under the age of 30,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “In the U.S., it’s the other way around. And in the U.S. it’s about information. But in China, the No. 1 priority is entertainment.” . . .
One question, though, is whether Google’s departure will prevent Chinese companies from developing alongside the world’s technology powerhouses.

“When the Chinese companies go outside of China, they will find that they fail to understand their competitors as well as they did when they were competing in China,” said Mr. Rieschel, founder of Qiming Ventures.

Of course, Chinese companies may just be happy staying home. With 400 million Internet users and growing, their own market is a substantial prize.

The story began at 11:49 a.m. on Saturday, October 17, when Bradford was updating his Facebook status at his father’s home in Harlem. A minute later, 12 miles away in Brooklyn, two men were mugged at gunpoint. . .

The online social network is ready to join telephone records and video cameras as a means of establishing an alibi — but the implications are both good and bad, says an intellectual property attorney versed in the medium.

“We’re in a much more trackable world, and for better and for worse,” said attorney Jonathan Handel. “The extent to which it means that the right people get prosecuted and the innocent get their cases dropped, that’s all of the good.”

But, he said, the issue of privacy is also at stake.

And he pointed out that it could be argued the Facebook update was a set-up.

“On the Internet, nobody really knows it’s you,” he said. “A kid could set up an alibi by setting up a Facebook update.”

Reuland finds that unlikely.

“This is a 19-year-old kid. He’s not a criminal genius setting up an elaborate alibi for himself,” he said. “This is not the kind of thing someone would fake.” And if someone were going to fake it, he said, “They’d do it in a lot clearer way” than the inside joke that Bradford posted: “On the phone with this fat chick… where my IHOP.”

The message was met with some incomprehension by reporters first writing about the story, who didn’t quite understand the reference to the International House of Pancakes.

It works the other way too, as Maxi Sopo found out. Sopo, who was wanted in Seattle for bank fraud charges, made the mistake of posting about “living in paradise,” according to this AP article:

Tracking Sopo through his public “friends” list, the prosecutor found his address and had Mexican authorities arrest him. Instead of sipping pina coladas, Sopo is awaiting extradition to the U.S.

Sopo learned the hard way: The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too.

Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit.

The document shows that U.S. agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips.

Among the purposes: Investigators can check suspects’ alibis by comparing stories told to police with tweets sent at the same time about their whereabouts. Online photos from a suspicious spending spree – people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars – can link suspects or their friends to crime.

The report, Digital Terrorism and Hate 2010, notes that there are about 11,500 hate-affiliated Web pages, a 20 percent jump from last year’s study.

According to the Wiesenthal Center, personal blogs as well as mainstream social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter are easily flooded with racist and terrorist-related content.

“The spike is not in traditional Web sites in the United States,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “It’s more global and almost all in the social-networking area.”

Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Wiesenthal Center and a co-author of the report, said home-grown terrorism suspects have an active online presence. He cited the case of a Pennsylvania woman who officials say called herself “Jihad Jane.”

[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.

The texted donations are being handled by a company called mGive, which started the campaign in a joint effort with the State Department and the Red Cross late Tuesday night. Thanks to a mention on the White House’s blog and lots of word of mouth on Twitter and Facebook, the campaign had raised well over a million dollars by Tuesday evening, mGive said.

“Today is a huge day for mobile giving,” said Tony Aiello, chief executive of mGive. “We are experiencing a tipping point.” …

Mr. Aiello said the widespread adoption of cellphones and social media Web sites was helping to foster this approach to fund-raising. “Mobile giving is currently outpacing the early days of online giving,” he said.

Awareness about the disaster in Haiti has swept through Twitter and other social media sites. Facebook, for example, said its users had posted more than 1,500 status updates a minute containing the word Haiti.

MGive, which was founded in 2005, works with more than 200 organizations and charities, including the American Heart Foundation and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Mr. Aiello said the Haiti campaign had “outpaced anything we’ve every done in mobile giving so far” and showed no signs of slowing.

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.”

The list below is ://URLFAN’s all-time top 10. The number in brackets to the right of each item is last year’s top 10 ranking (Nov ‘08).

#1. en.wikipedia.org (1)
#2. youtube.com (3)
#3. flickr.com (2)
#4. twitter.com (9)
#5. google.com (4)
#6. myspace.com (6)
#7. facebook.com (-)
#8. imdb.com (5)
#9. nytimes.com (7)
#10. apple.com (8)

There is one new entrant, Facebook at #7. washingtonpost.com moved out of the top 10, dropping from #10 last year to #12 this year.

Twitter is the biggest mover, up 5 places to #4.

….

://URLFAN isn’t a perfect measure of influence – you could easily argue that Google’s PageRank is far better. However we continue to like the concept and we believe it’s an accurate and up-to-date reflection of influential websites on the Web.

McManus references a previous post about super influencers, who tend to have outsized influence on others based on their numbers. That post discusses a 2008 report from Universal McCann, which came to its conclusions based on research among 17,000 active internet users in 29 countries.

Finally, super influencers are a worldwide phenonomen, according to McCann, but “there is a clear skew towards the emerging internet markets of Latin America and Asia Pacific.” Brazil has the highest rate of super influencers, with 24% of active internet users falling into the super influencer category. They are followed by India, Mexico and Pakistan, which McCann puts down to “how internet users have found their voice thanks to their massive use of social media in these markets.” . . .

There’s nothing really new in the report – we’ve known for a while now that social media is being used to create new forms of influence in the commercial and social worlds. But there’s good lessons here for brands and organizations that are still figuring out how to reach consumers in the Web age.

Obviously, effective public diplomacy takes into account the technology most available to the local populations – with cell phones winning out over PCs, in many cases. Still, the “good lessons” about how social media is creating new forms of influence are also applicable to governments and individual seeking to engage in diplomacy.