Mumbai is a social media-savvy city. It is also a magnet for terrorists who engage in acts of spectacular violence.When the bombings occurred during evening rush hour, shutting down transit networks throughout the famously congested city, residents also kicked in to use the power of cloud computing to help.

More than 750 million people have a Facebook account and more than 200 million people use Twitter, but the EU’s European External Action Service (EEAS) has only 4,132 followers on Twitter and 1,774 ‘likes’ on Facebook. The EEAS, the EU’s main foreign policy group, has all the presence of an ant on social media compared to Barrack Obama, who has more than 9 million Twitter followers.

n the immediate aftermath of the IDF’s takeover of the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara during last year’s pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza, Israel’s greatest public diplomacy victory came in the form of a private initiative by Latma... a satirical media criticism website...

Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told this water summit’s attendees that “water is a strategic necessity for Singapore” and so the country had “mobilized our machinery” in a holistic approach that includes investing in new technology and educating the public about water conservation.

SINGAPORE --- “Just turn on the faucet.”

That’s the answer most Americans and others in the developed world would give if asked how to get plenty of clean water. But for about two billion people, such a response is meaningless. These people – almost a third of the world’s population – do not have access to water that can be drunk without adverse health effects. An even greater number lack access to adequate sanitation, which is a principal reason that more than two million children die of diarrheal diseases each year.

In the 21st century, the democratization and diffusion of information is dissolving traditional barriers to power. People in every part of the world are clamoring to be heard and demanding a role in shaping their own future. This change is irreversible, unstoppable, and eminently desirable.

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. Journalists are becoming more inclined to see blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media as a valuable adjunct to traditional media.

It is the most popular subject on China's Internet that no one is allowed to talk about. After overseas media reported the death of former president Jiang Zemin, web-savvy Internet users in China are finding creative ways to jump the Great Firewall, the cloak of Internet security authorities use to disrupt or halt access to things deemed too sensitive for the Internet.