There was an odd tweet yesterday from Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It reads, "We can't leave the digital playing field to Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. This... shows need for 21st Century Statecraft."

HILLARY Clinton wants to change the face of diplomacy, and she is calling on all Americans to help her do it. The US Secretary of State spoke before hundreds in San Francisco on Friday, sponsored by the Commonwealth Club, to share her efforts at bolstering US foreign relations and her vision of expanding US diplomacy using technology and other means.

To head this division, the search engine titan has tapped a former State Department official “Jared Cohen” who is credited with assisting to bring social networking and other Web 2.0 tools to US diplomacy now heading to Google to form a new Think/do Tank called “Google Ideas”. Today that became official.

In July 2010, the Ministry of External Affairs sent its first ‘tweet’ through its official Twitter account, thus pulling India into the age of digital diplomacy. Despite being an information technology powerhouse, India is a late entrant in using tools of e-diplomacy...it is an apt moment to reflect on changes affecting the country’s diplomatic representation abroad. The basic change relates to the backdrop of India’s rising stock in the world.

The July/August issue of PDiN Monitor, the electronic review of public diplomacy in the news by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, focuses on the subject of Digital Diplomacy.

TAMPA --- At the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, some young civilians are pushing back at extremist messages that permeate Internet forums. This Digital Engagement Team’s members, who are fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, comb through online postings in their respective languages looking for incendiary or inaccurate commentary about U.S. military operations or related activity. When these messages are found, the team prepares “engagements” that challenge the writer’s logic or facts.

At the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, some young civilians are pushing back at extremist messages that permeate Internet forums. This Digital Engagement Team’s members, who are fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, comb through online postings in their respective languages looking for incendiary or inaccurate commentary about U.S. military operations or related activity.

This month, the Obama Administration's much-evangelized '21st century statecraft' approach has returned to the headlines...