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 New York Times has a story on the State Department’s trip to Moscow, with various social media honchos in tow, along with Twitter King Ashton Kutcher. They’re calling it “geek diplomacy”:

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.
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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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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).”
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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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The Guardian has an informative article about British diplomats who blog. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) launched a web platform two years ago and now 30 diplomats blog about all number of subjects.

The FCO says it takes a hands-off approach to what its ambassadors write about. Some stick to government policy. Others write colourfully about the pitfalls of overseas life. In a recent blog posting Britain’s governor of the Cayman Islands, Stuart Jack, revealed a gang of marauding green iguanas had invaded his roof. He even attached a picture. (Jack also pointed out that crocodiles once indigenous to the Cayman Islands but now found only in Cuba and Florida had been spotted paddling off the coast. He admitted that the sighting might have been a large fish.)
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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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President Obama responded to questions yesterday about Twitter and the Chinese government’s web filtering in a town hall with university students yesterday in Shanghai, China.

The questions had been e-mailed to the U.S. Embassy and were read aloud by U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman: “In a country with 350 million Internet users and 60 million bloggers, do you know of the firewall?” And second, “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?”

Obama’s response was polite – it did not directly criticize the host country’s government – but firm in its defense of non-censorship:
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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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