Outspoken Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has made his first anti-government comments since his release from detention, using Twitter to hit out at the treatment of colleagues and fellow dissidents and risking a potential return to custody. Mr Ai became the most high profile casualty of China's increasingly authoritarian stance following the Middle East uprisings, after which several prominent Chinese dissidents were detained.

As the riots in London continued for a third night on Monday, Egyptian bloggers, watching events unfold on live television, debated the meaning of the violent confrontations between young people and the police, which reminded some of them of their own pitched battles on the streets of Cairo a few months ago.

The Indian Embassy has taken to Sina Weibo, the popular Twitter-like microblogging service from China, in an attempt to portray India’s modern image and promote Indian culture and tourism to Chinese youngsters. Since Sina Weibo boasts a hundred million users...it provides a perfect platform for the Indian embassy to remove the earlier misconceptions and present a modern image of India.

The Indian Embassy in Beijing has taken to China’s widely popular version of Twitter in a new public diplomacy campaign aimed at directly reaching out to young, middle-class Chinese, in an attempt to present an often overlooked “modern” image of India here in China.

In the slow-evolving world of diplomacy, it may be the biggest innovation since the wax seal: social media that lets Canadian diplomats go around the censors to speak directly to, and hear from, the citizens of the world’s rising superpower.

When an Internet research group recently released a study concluding that the most influential person in the Twitter universe was Rafinha Bastos, a Brazilian comedian ...the English-speaking world was predictably baffled.

Today the significant opportunity in brand building is to maximize one idea across the globe, to create an inspirational rallying cry for a global consumer movement. It isn’t easy to communicate across different cultures and countries while having one overall brand that really makes an impact.The digital revolution is about getting people to love your brand, no matter where they are in the world.

The Department of State is pleased to announce “Ask Alan,” a new effort to engage with the Iranian people through our Persian language social media brand, USAdarFarsi. Every month on Facebook and Twitter, we will be asking our fans for questions on a topic that we set in advance. Our Persian language spokesman, Alan Eyre, will then provide answers to the most popular questions in Persian.