Can a multilateral solution to a violent conflict take place without taking social media into account? Looking at online discussions about Syria since the beginning of 2012, Seib’s theory appears to bear true, as conversations that began in the realm of the official evolved into conversations laden with public opinions.

If some marketers, fans and athletes have anything to say, these Games will be the first Social Media Olympics -- the "Socialympics," as some are calling them. Even the Olympic movement, which sometimes steps into the future with great caution, has warily accepted the idea.

Amazon will be responsible for upgrading software and enabling a text-to-speech capability on the Kindles. That latter requirement is aimed at integrating the Kindles into embassy-supported English teaching programs...Content on the Kindles will be sorted into “collections identified by the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.”

Digital diplomacy can be defined as the use of social networks by states and civil society to further foreign policy goals and influence public opinion, and the AFP e-diplomacy hub shows this in real-time, collating tweets from heads of state and government, diplomats, experts, foreign correspondents and activists from more than 150 countries.

The app displays the most-used hashtags, measures an individual’s influence (think Klout), and maps the relationships between these important figures. The e-diplomacy hub is an effective way to show which figures are talking about what issues, and where these public diplomatic dialogues are taking place.

She said that rumors in South Korea that the U.S. was exporting cows infected with mad cow disease spread through SNS, fueling anti-U.S. sentiment and nation-wide protests, and hindering free trade negotiations between the two countries. Esser said in such cases, however, the majority of the online community tends to shout down the extremists, working as a “self-correcting mechanism.”

Three years ago—back when I was still a carefree cyberutopian—I wrote a short essay on “high-tech diplomacy” for Newsweek. That essay—by far the glibbest text I've ever written—chided American diplomats for not exploiting the immense digital soft power that a company like Amazon had to offer.