I recently returned from the Middle East where I was part of a three week Arab & American Business Fellowship.

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.

If public diplomacy (PD) is understudied as a discipline, then even less is known about PD as practiced - or not - by less developed countries (LDCs) and their representatives abroad.