Countries as diverse as the United States and North Korea have all struggled at the nexus of statehood and social media. Until now, none have had to purchase the Twitter handle of their country's name from the owner of a porn site. That dubious honor goes to Israel, which recently purchased the user name @israel from Israel Meléndez, a Spanish man living in Miami, who registered the name back in 2007, early in the microblogging website's history.

California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has visited East Asia to try to drum up trade with the region and attract inward investment...Speaking ahead of the mission he said: "California is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the exploding Asian markets."

Haystack, a company that has created software designed to circumvent Iranian government censors, has stopped testing its program amid criticism of faulty security. Haystack founder Austin Heap said in an interview Monday that concerns about how his much-touted software program works and whether it's secure were “valid.”

The four media students developed The Secrets Behind the UAE Identity as part of their graduating project. The manuscript was finished within two months. As a part of their marketing strategy, they have used social networking websites, created radio advertisements and held mall events where the book was distributed for free.

Thousands of politicians all over the world are now on Twitter, and not all are using the social networking tool wisely. Take Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, a businessman who owns the Daily Times newspaper and is said to have been close to Benazir Bhutto, the late prime minister.

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.

Better communication of EU affairs by public service broadcasters is key to bridging the gap between the European Union and its citizens, said the European Parliament yesterday (7 September), highlighting in particular the "huge potential" of social media to reach out to young people.