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.

In Washington last week I sat down with a group of bloggers to interview two smart and savvy foreign correspondents. The fact that they were women, representing influential media from the Middle East, made their views interesting on several levels.

Nadia Bilbassy is a correspondent with MBC (Middle East Broadcasting Co.) and Joyce Karam is with London-based Arabic language daily Al Hayat. MBC owns Al Jazeera.

The response by individuals using Twitter to the Iranian election provides important perspectives for the scholarship and practice of Public Diplomacy.

Since last June’s election in Iran, updates of developments have appeared on Twitter alongside messages of support for protesters and celebratory tweets when websites from one side or the other were taken down. This spawned a number of press articles focusing on Iran’s Twitter Revolution.