We might be computer obsessed here in the United States, but in much of the world, mobile is king. The White House and State Department have been doing an impressive job recognizing that if they're to use digital media to reach target audiences outside the United States, than cell phones and other mobile devices can be a direct line into the pockets and lives of the members of those desired audiences.

Case in point: Obama's recent speech laying out his strategy for the war in Afghanistan. There's a benefit in having citizens of the region hear the President's words directly, but only a sliver of the populations of Afghanistan and Pakistan go online via computer. "Looking at data on Whitehouse.gov," reports the White House blog, "we don’t have a lot of traffic coming from Afghanistan and Pakistan because Internet penetration in the region is relatively low at 2% and 11% respectively. However, mobile penetration is much higher. 52% of the 177 million people in Pakistan have at least 1 mobile device and 30% of the 28.4 million in Afghanistan." To get at that audience, they took a minute-long segment from the President's address that was specifically targeted at everyday Afghanis and turned it into mini videos, complete with local language voiceovers, that can be sent around via cell phone.

The tiny size is a perfect fit for a cell phone screen, and voiceovers eliminate the problem of scrunched, unreadable subtitles. The White House's mobile video clip aimed at the citizens of Afghanistan is available in Arabic, Dari, Urdu, and Pashto (the last of which is the clip up above). Curious what exactly Obama is saying to the people of Afghanistan? It's available in English, too.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in conjunction with the office of special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, is about five days into an experiment mobile phones to build civil society in Pakistan. Working with three local cell phone companies and a U.S.-based mobile vendor, the State Department has set up in Pakistan what it is calling Humari Awaz. That's "Our Voice" in what seems to be Urdu. Here, in brief, is how it works: Pakistanis text in keywords to the network via the short code 7111, and those phrases are used to spontaneously create texting-based social lists -- around the day's price for cotton, the latest cricket scores, a community radio station's fan base, or perhaps the desire for less extremist political leadership.

The State Department is covering the cost of the first 24 million texts to Humari Awaz. How long that reserve will last remains to be seen. Less than a week in, and more than half a million SMS messages have been sent over the State-sponsored mobile network thus far. Visit ProPakistani for a taste of some of the suspicions and concerns the plan is raising in that country.

The Humari Awaz project is part of the Clinton State Department's push toward what it calls "21st century statecraft." In related news, Secretary Clinton recently announced while in Morocco that State was launching a "Civil Society 2.0" initiative, centered around providing education and training on the building blocks of digital literacy -- building a website, working with text messages, blogging, using a social network to create social change, and more. Clinton also announced $5 million in CS2.0 monies to be dedicated to "bolster[ing] the new media and networking capabilities of civil society organizations and promot[ing] online learning" in the Middle East and North Africa.

YouTube's new decision to make usage metrics publicly available give us a whole new trove of information to mine about how various political actors and messages are doing. This information--who’s watching your videos, geographic distribution, traffic flows and total views, ratings by users--has always been available to video publishers through YouTube's Insight tool. Now, if publishers choose to make that info public, we can see it too. Some examples of what you can find out: President Obama's special video message to the Iranian people on the Nowruz holiday, which has more than 600K views, was "most popular" in Iran: