As Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, noted in the wake of the interim deal on Iran’s nuclear program reached in Geneva on Saturday, the effort by Tehran’s negotiating team to explain and justify the country’s push for atomic energy behind closed doors was accompanied by a public diplomacy campaign conducted online.

This week, Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, was quoted as saying during a speech in Washington: "We can end government censorship in a decade. The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything." Earlier this week, we at greatfire.org successfully unblocked the Reuters Chinese website, which had been blocked on 15 November. We also unblocked the China Digital Times website, which has been blocked in China for years and earlier this month created mirrors for our FreeWeibo project.

The world's largest social network Facebook has listed Kosovo as a country more than five years after the breakaway territory proclaimed independence from Serbia, officials said Tuesday. "Facebook recognises Kosovo as a state," Minister for EU Integration Vlora Citaku wrote on Twitter. And Prime Minister Hashim Thaci said in a statement that he "was informed (on Monday) by senior Facebook executives... about including Kosovo in the global social network".

When negotiations over the future of Iran’s nuclear program broke down last week, the question of why they did loomed in everyone’s mind. In response, Secretary of State Kerry offered some weak explanation that Iranian negotiators had to get approval from higher ups back at home. Kerry’s comments were a deflection from blaming the French for putting the kibosh on the agreement. Rather than deflecting from the French, Senator John McCain, in a rare move for a conservative Republican, complimented the French for their bravery in stopping the agreement, proclaiming, “Vive la France!”

During the "Public Diplomacy of the Americas" conference hosted by the USC Association of Public Diplomacy Scholars, former Mexican Ambassador to the U.S. Arturo Sarukhán discussed U.S.- Mexico relations, highlighting the importance of increasing the digital component of Mexico's diplomacy to deal with issues such as trade relations, transnational crime, and immigration.

For the past six months, I've been reporting on a documentary, "Where Were You: The Day JFK Died," marking the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination. Simultaneously I've been keeping a close watch on the coverage of the political gridlock, food fight, meltdown—pick your phrase—in Washington between President Obama and his political adversaries.

India has 4G wireless service in a handful of cities, Afghanistan has 3G nationwide, Bangladesh is rolling out a nationwide 3G network, and even Nepal has 3G in major cities. That leaves Pakistan as the only country in South Asia without a high-speed mobile network. The country’s notoriously activist supreme court is trying to force the government into holding the spectrum auction needed to launch 3G services in early 2014—but the country’s equally notorious bureaucracy looks likely to delay things.

Last Friday, the United Nations Foundation and the Digital Diplomacy Coalition hosted “Digital Diplomacy +Social Good,” a half-day conference focused on the transformative power of technology in the evolving conversations about Public Diplomacy in the 21st-century. Dynamic speakers from embassies in Washington, D.C. and international organizations like the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the U.S. Department of State, and the British Council talked about the challenges and opportunities for the tradecrafts of diplomacy and communications in our digital world.