Kim A. Snyder's “Welcome to Shelbyville” is a melting-pot movie, asimmer with social issues: immigration, racism, unemployment, intolerance. Its examination of the clash between Somali Muslims and rural Tennesseeans does not sugarcoat the kinds of conflicts that have bedeviled the country for centuries; it questions, in its way, what America means. And it’s been shown around the world by the United States State Department.

I went to Angola as a delegate with the American Documentary Showcase, a State Department-funded program that sends American documentaries around the world, accompanied by filmmakers who teach filmmaking workshops.

Yuliana Lestari is searching for universities. She takes a brief tour of Oxford in England and then zooms off to Harvard with the help of Google’s Liquid Galaxy. The 16-year-old Indonesian is one of a host of youths who have come to take advantage of the high-tech resources inside “@ America," an initiative supported by the US Embassy in Jakarta that puts an edgy, 21st-century twist on public diplomacy.

Whether one supports or finds fault with current (and envisioned) U.S. diplomacy and international development processes and practices, most foreign policy analysts and academics will recognize the first Quadrennial Diplomatic and Development Review (QDDR) as a landmark document.

Goodbye, Mom and Dad. Hello, Parent One and Parent Two. The State Department has decided to make U.S. passport application forms "gender neutral" by removing references to mother and father, officials said, in favor of language that describes one's parentage somewhat less tenderly.

After two centuries of economic growth and increasing world influence, America has come to view itself as a nation apart. Other countries - France, Great Britain, Germany, Russia - may have been great powers. But the US has historically seen itself as an exceptional power - one destined to lead the others into a globalized era of democratic peace, underpinned by a universal network of free trade.

America's companies, products, universities, and philanthropists are active in every corner of the world. When we think of American foreign policy, we should think not only of what the government does, but what Americans do, whether through dot.gov, dot.com, dot.org, or dot.edu entities. America's footprint around the globe is far greater than that of the State Department.

I posted a short comment that a website devoted to public diplomacy, with a name that implies that it represents the views of the entire American government and the American public, should try to present a more balanced perspective and mention some of the difficulties in getting the U.S.-Russian agreement approved by the Senate.