“Hope” is the first lesson the Arab street is learning through the Tunisian experience. For decades, the Arab peoples have been depressed, felt helpless and had to live with the injustices, the failures and repressions of their post-colonial states. For the first time, an Arab people, Tunisians, have won against one of their regimes. The event had an echo among all Arab peoples. Many of them felt this strengthened their trust in themselves and their hope in the future.

Jordanian and Palestinian social network activists were busy this past weekend exchanging videos, pictures, and comments on the clashes following a local match in Amman on Friday evening. The match was between Al-Wehdat and Al-Faisali clubs. The players of the first club are made up, mainly, of Jordanians who are from a Palestinian origin, and the latter represents the originally Jordanian national team.

The peace process has been major news in almost all Arab media before, during and after direct negotiations started between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In broadsheet newspapers it is front page news; in broadcast media it usually comes first or second. The mood of the commentary and analysis was quite ambivalent.

Yesterday, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) made a public statement accepting the call of the French president Nicolas Sarkozy for a Middle East peace conference and his offer to host this conference. In his statement, Abbas emphasized that a condition for holding the conference must be a total freeze of settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories.

Twitter has had a phenomenological influence on the international news media in the post-Iranian elections period in June 2009 onwards. Through the continuous 24 hour- cycle of tweets, the micro-blogging site was challenging the censorship applied by the Iranian government on all news media covering the confrontations following the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . After years of state monopoly and censorship twitter and other social media sites and applications are making governments more concerned over news.