Yuliana Lestari is searching for universities. She takes a brief tour of Oxford in England and then zooms off to Harvard with the help of Google’s Liquid Galaxy. The 16-year-old Indonesian is one of a host of youths who have come to take advantage of the high-tech resources inside “@ America," an initiative supported by the US Embassy in Jakarta that puts an edgy, 21st-century twist on public diplomacy.

Mr. Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old Facebook chief executive and co-founder, may be the man of the moment in the United States and much of the rest of the online world. But here in Japan, one of the globe’s most wired nations, few people have heard of him.

When I came to Brussels just over three years now, European Politicians were not on Facebook, election ads were not made or broken by one’s twitter adeptness and no one in the European Commission had been told that any of these should be an option.

Late in 2010, TNS released a Kenya digital study as part of a three month study of the habits of online Africans. In Kenya it involved 800 interviews – 400 online, 400 face-to-face and tried to answer various questions like – who is online? What are people doing online? How can brands connect? What messaging/digital communication channels are best?

There are reasons to believe this next year will usher in an increased period of time of citizen diplomacy. We are indeed likely to see a jump in the amount of citizen to citizen diplomacy. Through the use of new media and incorporating traditional forms to breaking down barriers of communication between people.

Leading Indian wire agency Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) has launched its free iPhone and Android applications to help readers across the globe track the latest news, updates, features and analyses on a real-time basis.

What has changed, however — and this has made governments vulnerable to citizens’ legitimate criticism as never before (which is a good thing) — is that the sheer extent of potentially embarrassing and even “endangering” information that can be divulged by anyone motivated to do so...

2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem. We learned from diplomatic cables exposed by WikiLeaks that from Europe to the Middle East to China and beyond, Washington is having an even tougher time than we thought getting what it wants.