Ediplomacy promotes social networking technologies such as Twitter and Facebook to reach out to citizens, companies and others. "I define it as building on traditional forms of diplomacy to account for the technologies, the networks and the demographics of the 21st century," says Ross. "The key role for me is to be an accelerant."

Julian Assange interviewed Hizbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Tuesday in the first episode of the WikiLeaks founder’s provocative new show on RT, the Russian-government’s English-language propaganda channel.

As for RT itself, we should take it as another chance to poke the U.S. (even more). But what use of it for public diplomacy? Many Americans already take RT for a joke, that is, if they know about or watch it (which many don't). Is it how Russia is trying to get its message out to the English-speaking world?

If the State Department proves unable to maintain America’s leadership—either in physical or now increasingly in virtual environments—other institutions, individuals, networks, or governments surely will fill the vacuum, and not always in ways that serve America’s interests.

...The outing is a reminder to press freedom and open internet advocates of how U.S. public diplomacy folded into local media culture can construct political reality in emerging democracies that can change the outcome in the ballot box.

WikiLeaks has had some major successes...But judged by its own ambitions -- and the worst fears of its detractors ...the grand experiment of turning WikiLeaks into a conduit for "mass document leaking" has been an abysmal failure.

The U.S. State Department clearly views Al Jazeera as a tool of Qatar's foreign policy; one cable from November 2009 claims that the Persian Gulf state uses the channel "as a bargaining tool to repair relationships with other countries, particularly those soured by al-Jazeera's broadcasts, including the United States."

Syrians have accused Al Jazeera of seeking to foment unrest in the country, and at least one media outlet even accused the Qatar-based broadcaster of setting up film studios to stage some of the uprising. It comes as no surprise, then, that some might seize on the latest leaked cables as a way to discredit the news organization as simply being a mouthpiece for the U.S. government.