People living in Iran, Sudan and Cuba will have access to a wider array of Google products now that the U.S. government has decided to loosen some restrictions, according to this AP article:

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.
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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).

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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Ernest J. Wilson,  dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at USC and a university fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, has a thoughtful piece in the Huffington Post on the ramifications of Google’s announcement that it may withdraw from China, and how it may affect not just China but also U.S. foreign policy:

A consequence of the digital economy’s timidity is that the U.S. foreign policy agenda has not changed very much in substance or tone. But now, if other major content producers follow Google into the ring, the strategic and diplomatic gravity of big Silicon Valley firms may finally match their economic weight. Of course, traditional matters like military strategy, state-to-state diplomacy and the like will always remain important elements of a nation’s statecraft. But moving forward we may see a couple of changes that suggest we have reached an inflection point.
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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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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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One of the things discussed at the iDiplomacy symposium last week was the crowdsourcing and democratization of map making. In some countries where there are few maps available companies like Google have been able to rely on local knowledge to produce maps that are more complete and accurate than professionally created ones.

The New York Times has an interesting article that talks about the growing involvement of the public in the development in online maps:
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