If you spent much time reading the commentary around Hillary Clinton's Council on Foreign Relations speech yesterday, you just couldn't get away from the idea that this marked Clinton's attempt to plant her own flag as our chief diplomat. That while, sure, her mission is driven by the President and the White House, but this was her coming out as a leader-in-full, with a vision all her own of how she'll achieve the State Department's goals on the world stage. True? Yeah, perhaps.

But talk to people in the know about the day-to-day workings of both the State Department and White House, and what comes across is another dynamic, one less contentious but more interesting in many ways. That's how closely forward-looking folks in both institutions are working together to use technology in support of the administration's diplomatic aims. Of course, let's not be silly. This isn't the first time a State Department has supported a president. It's part of the job description. But technology seems to be greasing the wheels on that relationship. One or two runs below Clinton, there's tech-driven symbiosis afoot. Take Obama's speech last week in Accra, Ghana. It's a great example of how, using new media, two DC powerhouses are feeding off one another's efforts. A taste of what we're talking about here...

The forward-thinking State Department provided back-up for President Obama's address from Egypt earlier today by reaching out to foreign audiences where they live: on their cell phones. The State Department set up a program to text out "highlights" of the speech throughout the Middle East -- in Arabic, Urdu, and Persian, as well as English. Sign up took place on America.gov, though not for Americans back at home; the New York Times' Roy Furchgott explains that State Department funds can only be used to engage with foreign audiences. State did, however, broadcast a handful of reply texts viewable both here and abroad on america.gov/sms-comments.html. (The first, as of this moment, is in Arabic. The second, from Egypt: "I love obma very much.")

Also lending a hand to the administration's goal of making Obama's address ubiquitous: the White House's official Twitter feed and Facebook application.

Miss the speech, sleepy head? The White House blog is promising to post a transcript and video shortly.

Via CitizenTube, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton keeps up her encouraging but somewhat ethereal call for all Americans to engage in tech-powered "21st century statecraft." Relatedly, we're keeping an eye on State's website for more details on how the promised Virtual Student Foreign Service might work.

As our Ari Melber noted below, we and other commentators have taken note that Secretary Hillary Clinton's State Department embraced the Internet with gusto -- taking to the web not only as a work tool, but as a potential change agent around the globe. A major case in point is the delegation of representatives of American tech companies including including Twitter, Google, MeetUp, AT&T, Blue State Digital, and Wordpress sent by the State Department to Baghdad in late April. The goal of the official trip was to impress upon Iraqis that social media can help to knit together their society, connecting the Iraqi people eager to rebuild their country with those leaders working at great risk to do the same.

That vision of a progressive, modern Iraq was a primary reason why the total absence of American women on the trip was so striking. The pursuit of an inclusive new Iraq set in sharp relief the fact that of the dozen or so members of the American delegation, not a single one was female. For some observers, the lack of gender diversity took the sheen off of an otherwise intriguing outreach mission. So I recently asked the State Department's Jared Cohen, who helped lead the trip to Iraq, to explain how the skewed composition of the trip's delegation came to pass...

The zeal of a convert is perhaps not an inapt phrase to described the passion with which Hillary Clinton has taken to social media since being appointed Secretary of State. Her presidential campaign wasn't known for tapping into the power of the web. But Secretary Clinton has been making remarks of late that, to a striking degree, frame the future of diplomacy as something we'll be doing in large part with computers, social networks, and connections made online. For yesterday's commencement address at the all-women's Barnard College in New York, Clinton focused on the special opportunities that online connections might present women:

Some months ago here in New York, I had the privilege of meeting a young girl from Yemen. Her name is Nujood Ali. When she was nine years old, her family offered her into marriage with a much older man who turned out to be violent and abusive. At ten years old, desperate to escape her circumstances, she left her home and made her way to the local courthouse where she sat against a wall all day long until she was finally noticed, thankfully, by a woman lawyer named Shada Nasser, who asked this little girl what she was doing there. And the little girl said she came to get a divorce. And thanks to this lawyer, she did.

Now in another time, the story of her individual courage and her equally brave lawyer would not have been covered in the news even in her own country. But now, it is beamed worldwide by satellites, shared on blogs, posted on Twitter, celebrated in gatherings. Today, women are finding their voices, and those voices are being heard far beyond their own narrow circumstances. And here’s what each of you can do. You can visit the website of a nonprofit called Kiva, K-i-v-a, and send a microloan to an entrepreneur like Blanca, who wants to expand her small grocery store in Peru. You can send children’s books to a library in Namibia by purchasing items off an Amazon.com wish list. You can sit in your dorm room, or soon your new apartment, and use the web to plant trees across Africa through Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt movement.

And with these social networking tools that you use every day to tell people you’ve gone to get a latte or you’re going to be running late, you can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking or child marriage, like the two recent college graduates in Colombia – the country – who organized 14 million people into the largest anti-terrorism demonstration in history, doing as much damage to the FARC terrorist network in a few weeks than had been done in years of military action. (Applause.)

And you can organize through Twitter, like the undergraduates at Northwestern who launched a global fast to bring attention to Iran’s imprisonment of an American journalist. And we have two young women journalists right now in prison in North Korea, and you can get busy on the internet and let the North Koreans know that we find that absolutely unacceptable. (Applause.)

These new tools are available for everyone. They are democratizing diplomacy. So over the next year, we will be creating Virtual Student Foreign Service Internships to partner American students with our embassies abroad to conduct digital diplomacy. And you can learn more about this initiative on the State Department website.

The full remarks are here.

Remember that State Department trip that representatives from new media companies like Twitter, YouTube, and HowCast took to Baghdad a few weeks back? The outreach seems to already be fulfilling some of its more straightforward objectives. Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salim has taken to Twitter -- an outcome predicted by participants on the trip. A sampling of Salim's tweets:

• Sorry, my first tweet not pleasant; dust storm in Baghdad today & yet another suicide bomb. Awful reminder that it is not yet all fine here.
• Boring day so far! Meeting after meeting-not much to show up for, I must admit. Preparing for London conf on investment in Iraq on the 30th.
• Pres Sarkozi is smart&engaging!Substantive meeting on Iraq-France relations& future of region. Amazing how dynamics have changed since war.

Jared Cohen, the State Department point person on the use of social media in public diplomacy, passes along his take on the significance of Salih's tweets:

It was a remarkable scene to sit in Deputy Prime Minister Salih's garden in Baghdad and watch Twitter founder Jack Dorsey convince him that he should be the first Iraqi senior official tweeting. The Deputy Prime Minister -- an avid technology evangelist himself -- promised to sign-up the next day. Not only did he sign-up, but he has been posting Twitter updates that are candid and insightful.

In America successful use of technology in the political sphere has highlighted how technology leads to more effective communication, organizing, engagement, accountability and transparency, empowerment, and capacity building. We hope that Dr. Salih tweeting will inspire similar trends in Iraq, not just for politicians and government officials, but also for civil society. The free flow of information and the enhanced ability for the Iraqi people to communicate in real time will be an exciting development in a country with tremendous history of innovation and talent.

(Photo of Salih with General David Petraeus, courtesy of the U.S. Army)

How people learned about the internal wranglings over diplomatic nominations in the dark and dank pre-Twitter era, well, beats me. You picked up a phone and questioned sources or something? Dunno. But, thankfully, we have the Twitter, and the Twitter tells us that one Bush-era diplomat most closely associated with State's new media efforts has expressed (reserved) approval for a criticized member of Hillary Clinton's new flotilla of diplomats. Colleen Graffy was the Deputy Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, and was perhaps best known to many of us as being a freewheeling Twitterer. Graffy earned the mocking of the Washington Post's arbiter of good Washington behavior, Al Kamen, for tweeting about her sartorial dilemmas while packing for a diplomatic jaunt to Iceland and other open musings. Graffy left State during the Obama transition, as did her boss, James Glassman. Nominated to replace Glassman is a Clinton ally and fundraiser by the name of Judith McHale. There have been some grumblings amongst public diplomacy advocates that McHale -- a marketer and corporate executive by background -- was the wrong fit for a job that, under Glassman at least, engaging laterally with the global community and doing it on occasion through new media like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Graffy, though, is offering up a tentative seal of approval on McHale's nomination to succeed her old boss. "Very good meeting w U/S Designate Judith McHale to talk re Public Diplomacy at the State Dept," she tweeted. "She might be exactly who we need 4 that job."

(Photograph of Colleen Graffy courtesy of the State Department)

If my own recent conversations and Internet back-channel chatter are any indication, then there's a great deal curiosity in tech and politics circles about what the purpose was of that recent "new media" delegation to Iraq. Last week's trip saw folks from companies like Twitter, Google, and YouTube sit down with such Iraqi luminaries as President Jalal Talabani to discuss the future of the new Iraq. (Some background here, if you haven't been following the trip.) What was the thinking behind a State Department trip that brought together the mucketiest of mucks in Iraq with reps from a handful of web 2.0 companies? The State Department lead on the trip is still making his way back from Iraq. But participants on the trip already have boots back down in the U.S., and a few more details about the historic trip are emerging...