The 24-year-old host of "OMG Meiyu," a trendy, cross cultural English teaching feature produced by Voice of America’s Mandarin Service, has become an overnight sensation in China...More than 2-million people have now clicked on Jessica Beinecke’s quirky videos, which teach Chinese speakers about common English expressions used by young Americans.

Jesus Daily, a page that has 8.4 million “Likes” and belongs to a North Carolina-based diet doctor...features a picture of Jesus dressed as a shepherd and is updated daily with biblical quotes, prayers and reflections on the man who Christians call the savior. The New York Times notes that Jesus Daily is hardly the only wildly popular religious page and that the page speaks to a trend of people connecting with their faith outside of traditional religious institutions.

When people think of social media and revolutions, I think the tendency is to think solely of activists organizing rallies on Twitter and Facebook (they do do that too.) But more important seems to be the way that social media and shared cell phone video footage help in building a shared consciousness.

The ways that humans communicate with each other are diversifying and changing rapidly. Some people think if a golden era when Voice of America was on shortwave radio and there were the huddled masses listening and then looking for the secret police to knock on the door and hide the radio. That's not where we're at now.

Over the past two years, Ross, 39, has been incorporating those digital platforms into the daily lives of U.S. diplomats. Dozens of U.S. ambassadors around the world now use Facebook and Twitter, and the State Department boasts nine foreign-language Twitter accounts. These technologies, Ross argues, give the U.S. a new suite of tools for exerting "smart power" to advance its interests.

The relevant Chinese government departments should think about how to deal with overseas publicity and public diplomacy in Vietnam: winning hearts and minds, especially of the post-Vietnam-War generation, who have a much more favorable impression of the U.S., than of China.

The anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks in recent days has dramatically accelerated the pace at which it posts confidential State Department cables, exposing the names of people who spoke to American diplomats in confidence. The development has alarmed U.S. officials and human rights groups, who say it will endanger foreign nationals who helped the United States and make it less likely that others will do so in the future.

DreamWorks Animation has become the second Hollywood studio to enter into a distribution agreement with China's top online video site, Youku.com. Youku said Monday that it had signed a deal with the Glendale-based animation studio to distribute the "Kung Fu Panda" movies in China, marking the first time that DreamWorks releases have been made available in that country through the Internet.