It's never been so easy to find out what people whose experiences of the world are very different to our own, think and feel. Often the perspectives of an organisation's staff and would-be service users can be as different as any two people on Twitter, and as such, they may never cross paths...this is where both our greatest challenges and opportunities lie in the social web.

The number of people using Facebook during May fell in the US, UK, Canada, Norway and Russia, according to new data. The slowing growth in user numbers may indicate that Facebook has hit the limits of expansion in the countries where it was first successful – and perhaps even that some early adopters from those countries have stopped using it.

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks. The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries.

Your plan must include approaching the most senior politicians, mobilizing the relevant force multipliers... using the media, influencing local public opinion, and public diplomacy aimed at all the relevant communities.

CPD Advisory Board member Simon Mainwaring had his recent book, We First, reviewed by Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire.

Under the State Department's Whatchamacallit for Public Diplomacy are... Arabic-speaking members of the Digital Outreach Team who respond to blog posts in the region... the State Department has developed its own Twitter and Facebook accounts in Arabic, Persian, and other languages.

A blogger whose frank and witty thoughts on Syria's uprising, politics and being a lesbian in the country shot her to prominence was last night seized by armed men in Damascus. Several Facebook pages had been set up on Monday evening calling for her release...and activists were tweeting using the hashtag FreeAmina.

No plugging of Twitter accounts or Facebook pages on French broadcast airwaves. France's audiovisual authority says that TV and radio stations that promote their sites on the two gargantuan social media services on air are actually engaging in secret - and unfair - advertising.