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Search #endSH on Twitter today, June 20, and you will find a flood of tweets from men and women in Egypt and elsewhere in the region bemoaning and berating the prevalence of sexual harassment in Egypt's streets – and crowdsourcing ways to combat it.

One of the greatest lessons in social media is that everything begins with listening and such is true for any form of leadership. Governments and their administrations have much to learn. Not only are new media channels rich with insight, they are also interactive. There are people on the other side who have expectations of recognition, acknowledgement, and engagement.

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 Obama administration is embarking on a fundamental overhaul of Voice of America and other official broadcasters — one that seeks to adapt their traditional diplomatic missions to the era of Facebook and Twitter...the need for the United States to get its message across to an often hostile world is greater than ever.

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.

France and the United States have long been engaged in a friendly war for global prestige and pre-eminence -- especially in the technological and cultural spheres. It is not entirely irrelevant to situate this latest French obstacle to American technological and cultural influence within the longstanding animosity between France and the U.S. in these spheres.

When Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt couldn't reach his counterpart in Bahrain by traditional means of communication, he turned to Twitter...Many politicians and diplomats worldwide have already embraced social media as a tool to communicate with the public...

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