The Los Angeles Times reports on how the city's police and fire departments overcame their distrust of social media to tap into the real-time public conversation about the rash of car-burnings of the last four days. “This investigation is social media phenomenon," Sheriff’s Capt. Mike Parker told the paper. “Early, in terms of the public information office, the PIOs noticed that a lot of the best information was coming from and being distributed by social media. We wanted to speak to the public where the public is, and that is social media.” Using a common Twitter handle (@arsonwatchla) and Facebook page also helped. Read More

With poll numbers putting Ron Paul in the lead in Iowa very close to the first Republican caucus, the lens of national attention will put the congressman from Texas in sharp focus. We know his campaign, much more disciplined now than it was in 2008, is preparing for what's to come. But how will his famously zealous online supporters handle the scrutiny of their chosen candidate? Read More

As you settle in to watch tonight's episode of "Survivor: Republican Presidential Candidate Edition," which will be airing on Fox News at 9pm with the quaint-sounding title, "Iowa Debate," it's worth taking a look at one feature of last Saturday's episode of the series that didn't get much attention. That program, which was aired on ABC News, included an interactive real-time feedback feature produced by Yahoo News that -- for the first time, ever -- not only invited viewers to respond to the show while it was underway, but managed to push a smidgen of that audience feedback back into the live program, where it potentially could have influenced the conversation. That is, the people who used to be called the audience were actually given a chance to talk back to a television show, by the show itself. Read More

Juliana Rotich, the ED of Ushahidi, blogs about a moment of "discovery and awe" that just happened at the Eye on Earth conference in Abu Dhabi. They got into a conversation about crowdsourcing with three participants from Afghanistan, and on the spot discovered--to everyone's surprise--a robust deployment of Ushahidi's Crowdmap tool being used by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock in Nangarhar Province. Read More

Left meets right? A friend of PdM, Bari George, points out this PBS video by Walter Kirn, author of "Up in the Air," where he suggests the way to fix Washington is to make Congress virtual. Read More

Russian democracy activist Maria Gaidar has launched a social media campaign in solidarity with the hundreds of people who have been arrested in the wake of post-election protests called ARRESTme2. Read More