With a predominantly English speaking subscriber base, it has been hard to view Facebook’s demographics as representative of the Arab consumer. At the same time, no homegrown social network has been successful in appealing to Arabic language Internet users in numbers and the region’s Arabic language social media environment has remained a fragmented one. This is now changing: fast.

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.

We are led to think that diplomacy is a function of this or that Secretary of State, or the exchanges between Presidents -- and of course, that's true. But the foundation of public diplomacy happens through the tight knots tied through high quality, high impact people to people encounters.

A transnational world is emerging through social media. Corporations are global. Supply chains are global. The conversation is global. The world is integrated as never before. Yet states guard their sovereignty with a strange ferocity.

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

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.