iDiplomacy will have a lighter publishing schedule this holiday season. But we’ll still be posting links to interesting articles on Twitter (@idiplomacy). Here are a few:

The Turkish Foreign Ministry held its first teleconference Thursday.

Newsweek article on Abu Dhabi’s growing arts scene, including the company Twofour54 — “(named after the emirate’s geographical coordinates) [it's] a ‘content-creation community’ that encompasses a giant high-definition film studio, a state-of-the-art television and radio broadcasting center, a media-training academy, and a division to fund new projects. The goal is to produce high-quality indigenous films, TV shows, news, and even gaming specifically for the Arab world (move over, Mario Kart, here comes Hameed Humvee).”
Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook has a new portal at peace.facebook.com, which tracks the friend connections made each day by people of different countries, religions and political affiliations. TechCrunch has a write up here:

“Peace.facebook.com is fairly simple at this point, with a handful of graphs and a widget that lets Facebook users share what they think of the site. The most compelling portion offers a series of graphs depicting ‘Friendships of Facebook’, which shows how many members of historically hostile groups are becoming friends on Facebook. . . . There’s also a graph that shows the results of a daily poll conducted by Facebook on whether or not World Peace is possible in the next 50 years (over 35% of Columbians think so, but only 7% of users in the US are optimistic).”

Read the rest of this entry »