The New York Times has good article about some of the Chinese companies that are likely to benefit in the short term — but perhaps be less competitive outside of the country — due to Google’s departure. Google was never a great fit in China, with Baidu taking the lion’s share of the search market, and other American companies like Yahoo and Twitter faced obstacles as well:

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.
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Hat tip to MediaPost, which has noted that the Saudi Arabian Embassy to the United States is now tweeting as @SaudiEmbassyUSA:

Yowza! Okay, it’s not quite Ashton or MTV, but that’s kind of the point: if risk-averse diplomats (whose whole job is basically message and brand control) see value in Twitter, it would seem to suggest even the most conservative, publicity-shy brands can find a home on the burgeoning social communication site.
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The Simon Wiesenthal Center for Tolerance has a report indicating a 20 percent increase in hate-affiliated content, according to CNN:

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.
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Remember the early days of online foreign language translation when translating a phrase from English to a foreign language then back to English was as entertaining as turning on Facebook’s Pirate mode?

When it comes to Google Translate, those days are largely over, according to this New York Times article by Miguel Helft. According to Helft:
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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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Tuesday’s state dinner in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the first of the Obama presidency, included many sartorial nods to the honored country. Michelle Obama wore a strapless gold and silver gown by Indian-born designer Naeem Khan, accessorizing with a number of bangles.

Director M. Night Shyamalan brought his wife, Bhavna Shyamalan, clad in a striking black and white sari.
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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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I was asked about the role of storytelling in civic participation at the Futures of Entertainment Conference.

I don’t think the average person typically connects policy or legislation to their daily lives.  They probably don’t know that Section 2704 of the recent 2,074 page health care bill prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage due to a pre-existing condition.  But they can relate to the story of the family who lost their house because the pre-existing condition wasn’t covered by insurance.  People can relate to such stories on an emotional and human level.   And I think that emotional connection is what often inspires civic participation and activism.

Technology and social media are changing the game because people now have the opportunity to tell their own story and don’t need to rely upon traditional media to do it for them.
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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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The name “Matt Harding” probably doesn’t ring any bells but there’s a good chance that you’ve seen him dancing. He’s not one of the professionals on “Dancing with the Stars” nor has he been on “So You Think You Can Dance.” Implicit in the title of the latter television show is that the contestants think that they can dance well. Matt makes no such claim.

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