According to the latest Pew survey, in almost all the countries surveyed, the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter didn't change much from 2010 to 2011. Two notable exceptions were Egypt, where 28% of respondents now use social networks -- up from 18% last year -- and Russia, where social-networking use rose from 33% to 43%.

In the interval between when BBC aired reports of Kim Jong Il's death and when CCTV and other Chinese state media got around to making their own reports on Monday, the Chinese Internet was already abuzz with news and commentary on the North Korean leader's passing, from famous and unknown Weibo users alike.

Reports of the arrival of a "China Spring" are premature, but the comparison is closer than anyone would have predicted before last week. Long after authorities from Beijing re-establish control, Wukan's achievement will affect China's internal security policy, succession dynamics in the run-up to the 2012 leadership handover, and even China's foreign policy.

With 40 percent of Russian adults online, many say social media, including the Russian social networking site VKontakte, has made it possible for a long stalled opposition movement in Russia to organize a rally that size.

Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group in Somalia, has posted on Twitter more than 80,000 times since setting up an account. The move demonstrates that, in the 21st century, no radical insurgency or martyrdom operation is complete without a social media platform, even if Somalia is one of the world's poorest and most anarchic countries.

In China, a large number of government departments and officials have stepped into the online world through weibo, the most popular and biggest micro blog service in China. But most of them are still more show than tell, while some have just followed the new media trend blindly without interacting with netizens.

Why would the U.S. State Department even take the trouble to organize a “virtual embassy,” which as the website states is not actually an embassy but public diplomacy? Since the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, the United States has had no embassy in Tehran...