The Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs was on Thursday given the prestigious India eGov 2.0 Awards 2010 for the most innovative use of social media and Web 2.0 tools in government. The event was held in the evening at the Hotel Claridges in Central Delhi.

Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" has gone global, sparking sister rallies from Tel Aviv to Mt. Everest Base Camp on Oct. 30, the same day that Mr. Stewart will convene a gathering of like-minded cohorts on the Washington Mall. "Everyone was getting excited" about the rally in Washington, says Kittie Brown, a marketing consultant and mother of three who lives in Paris.

The Christian Science Monitor interviewed CPD Director Philip Seib about how the Internet has influenced the rise of social movements such as Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" which has gone global in a short amount of time. Seib notes, "the Internet only amplifies these movements. I would think we’re going to have more and more phenomena that start national and become global."

On Sept. 2, Chowrangi, an English-language online journal of culture and news in Pakistan, published a story about three explosions in Lahore that killed more than 30 and wounded more than 200, including women and children. Like a lot of online stories, this one sparked vociferous comments.

Philip Seib was quoted in a piece about how Central Command uses social media to respond to "enemy" propaganda, "you get a lot of wrong information, purposely or accidently, on the web, that can take on a life of its own and by engaging people about that expands the debate."

North Korean propaganda has emerged on popular Internet social media sites. It is not for domestic consumption as virtually no North Korean has Internet access. Rather it is targeted at other countries, especially South Korea.

The Foreign Ministry launched its official Youtube channel on Wednesday at the web address youtube.com/Israel, with the channel featuring nearly 130 videos about life in Israel. Until Wednesday, all of the Foreign Ministry’s videos were presented on the Israel MFA page.

He blames the media for creating a "witch's brew" by shaping "political, socio-economic, religious, perceptions" in the Middle East. But perhaps most surprisingly, Imam Feisal goes so far as proposing that the media not report on suicide attacks, an argument that naïvely underestimates the power of new digital media outlets, like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.