PD commentary
Selection and commentary by PDC members and authoritative experts in the field
Sunday, April 10th 2011
If you believe that a Tweet is just 140 characters of plain text, think again.
There is a ton of metadata buried in the Tweet message and it tells a lot about when the message was sent, by whom, using what applicatiion, at what time, from what server, etc.
Thank Raffi Krikorian, a developer on Twitter's API/Platform team, for giving us a look at what a Tweet looks like -- that is, if you are an expert who knows how to read all the data-rich detail.
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Friday, April 8th 2011
In a tiny, crowded conference room on Capitol Hill April 6 --- ignored by camera crews covering what appeared to be an imminent U.S. government shutdown --- a decades-old struggle on the content of America’s publicly-funded international broadcasts surfaced once again.
The setting was the first meeting of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations, chaired by Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). The hearing’s title: “Is America’s Overseas Broadcasting Undermining our National Interest and the Fight Against Tyrannical Regimes?”
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Friday, April 8th 2011
The Council is proud to make available a new video production about public diplomacy.
This re-issue of two half-hour video programs made in 1996, begins with a new introduction and commentary by Robert Chatten and Ambassador Linda Jewell, two veteran practitioners.
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Tuesday, April 5th 2011
April 5, 2011
“One part of the U.S. government has anti-censorship technology, but no money to expand its use. Another part of the U.S. government has money for anti-censorship technology but hasn’t spent it.”
This was columnist Anne Applebaum, writing April 5 in the Washington Post. Her subject was free international access to the Internet. All of the information and numbers discussed below are hers.
The federal agency with the anti-censorship technology but no money to use it is the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The agency with the money for the technology is the Department of State, which Applebaum says got $30 million from the Congress in 2009 to fight web censorship, but has spent none of it.
This may not shock anyone inured to the shortcomings of bureaucracy. And the explanation for it is surely more complicated than simple bureaucratic foot-dragging. But if the two agencies could put even some of the money together with the technology, great results could flow. So what’s going on here?
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Friday, April 1st 2011
The first step to developing a public diplomacy strategy is to understand the problem and the audience. So I joined several hundred people at the National Press Club last Tuesday (March 29) to hear a panel of experts discuss what social media can tell us about attitudes in the Middle East. Their presentation was titled “Forecasting the Future: Social Media, Predictive Analysis and the Arab World.”
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