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President Obama held the first ever “Twitter Townhall” yesterday.

Here’s a graphic showing the kind of questions President Obama will get on Twitter this afternoon.

(H/T BuzzFeed)

A Japanese student studying in the US was horrified to learn that the tsunami hit her hometown. But thanks to YouTube she discovered that her family had survived.

Hat tip for awesome English skills too!

This article titled “Egypt blocks social media websites in attempted clampdown on unrest” was written by Charles Arthur, technology editor, for The Guardian on Wednesday 26th January 2011 19.57 UTC

Internet sites such as Twitter and Facebook were cut off within Egypt today as the government of President Hosni Mubarak tried to prevent social media from being used to foment unrest.

Many sites registered in Egypt could not be reached from outside, according to Herdict.org, a website where users report access problems.

Twitter, YouTube, Hotmail, Google, Chinese search engine Baidu and a “proxy service” – which would allow users to evade obvious restrictions – appeared to be blocked from inside the country, according to reports on the site.

Twitter said blocking was intermittent and some users were able to tweet while Bambuser, a Swedish site for streaming video from mobile phones, said it had been blocked after being used by some protesters this week.

About 24%, or 19.2 million, of Egypt’s 80 million population have internet access, usually through internet cafes, mobile internet or “public information technology clubs”. About 1m have home access via computer.

Far more people – about 26 million – have mobile phones, so protests could be organised via text message. Vodafone, one of the two largest mobile phone operators there, said it was not responsible for blocking Twitter. “It’s a problem all over Egypt and we are waiting for a solution.”

Other reports say the government has disabled mobile phone towers and the telephone service, and that all communications have been disrupted. This could not be confirmed.

The government could order internet service providers to filter out services or block sites, but usually cracks down on writers and bloggers. In 2009 the Committee to Protect Journalists listed Egypt as one of the 10 worst countries for bloggers because of the tendency to arrest critics.

The government might have ordered the military to commandeer communications centres, leading to the blocking.

But any piecemeal attempt to identify sites being used to organise protests or beam video to the outside world will inevitably lead to a cat and mouse game between the authorities and protesters, who will be able to stay one step ahead.

Meanwhile, Egyptian government websites were targeted in return by Anonymous, the group of hackers who take on opponents they see as unpopular or oppressive. Reports suggested that a number of official sites had been hacked or put offline.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Source: Associated Press

2010: A Year in Viral Videos

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with “60 Minutes.”

Former President George W. Bush visited Facebook headquarters today in Palo Alto, California (NOT Bush Country). He sat down with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a wide ranging chat. The discussion was streamed live on Facebook.

It’s still very much in the beta stage of testing, but I would like everyone to check out a brand new site I launched this week. It’s called Contwit and it’s a live stream of conservative chatter on Twitter. The standard hashtag that conservatives tag their tweets with is #TCOT (Top Conservatives On Twitter).

What Contwit does is show a live stream of every tweet tagged with #TCOT in real-time. In the coming weeks their will be additional features added as well.

Anyway, take a look at the site and let me know what you think.

http://contwit.com

I agree with Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher on pretty much nothing politically, but I have to give social media props when they’re due. Tommy suffered a major heart attack last night and actually tweeted about it from the back of an ambulance.

Now that’s hardcore.

Get well soon, Tommy.