Online, mixing life and work — and maybe too much life

• Reuters' Chrystia Freeland profiled how Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, Michael McFaul, U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, use Twitter:

  One way Mr. Bildt uses Twitter is promote his bigger think pieces. “A lot of the tweets are links,” he said. “If I write an op-ed, then I can tweet it.” Mr. Bildt combines his Twitter posts with a blog . Twitter is for links and instant comments; the blog is for longer, more considered arguments. Mr. Bildt tweets in English and blogs in Swedish. One of Mr. Bildt’s followers is Mr. McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. He likes the way Mr. Bildt mixes life and work, one moment tweeting about Syria and the next gently complaining about the long line for takeoff at the Istanbul airport. “The thing I feel most nervous about is blending the personal and the professional,” Mr. McFaul said. “That’s new to me. I’m learning where the lines are."

   

• The General Services Administration, already under criticism for an expensive conference in Las Vegas, is now coming into an even worse light with the release of a joke video created by an employee during the conference. Dreaming of a stint as commissioner full of high-dollar purchases, he pledges that he'll "never be under investigation” by the agency’s inspector general. The video was released by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who obtained it from the GSA inspector general.

• The White House is allowing users to "calculate" their federal tax dollar receipt to understand how their tax dollars are being spent.

Stitching together a case

• Each of around a dozen Arizona state lawmakers received a hand-knit uterus in criticism of a proposal to limit birth control coverage in what appears to be part of an Internet-powered project called Government Free VJJ.

A Kickstarter for seed funding

• President Obama has signed the JOBS act, which includes crowdsourcing provisions.

Re: Whoops

• The Assistant Maryland State Attorney sent an email to the Maryland Stadium Authority advising officials against speaking to the Baltimore Sun — then, apparently by mistake, sent that email to the Sun itself.

Stuff Chris Dodd Says

• MPAA head Chris Dodd suggested in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that conversations about piracy legislation like SOPA are still ongoing. Demand Progress has already started a petition denouncing "backroom dealing" over the issue. Senators have also asked the FTC to go after software piracy overseas.

• Reddit users have launched their campaign to unseat SOPA supporter Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex) with a website and a video, and are raising money to run their ad on TV.

Around the Web

• Poynter noted that Buzzfeed is now under greater pressure to conform to accuracy expectations as it moves into more serious journalism. The site ended up removing "unbelievable" photos from recent Texas tornadoes for being inaccurate.

• In Massachusetts, both the Republican and Democratic parties have released new online ads in the Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren. The Republican ad attacks Warren on immigration issues, while the Democratic ad responds to Brown's claims of bipartisanship by linking him to Mitt Romney.

• Conservative Catholics are using the web to more closely investigate which organizations Catholic groups give money to and if they comply with their religious or political beliefs, resulting in loss of funding for some groups.

• Two U.S. lawmakers are concerned that Google is profiting from ads placed by sex traffickers and seek reassurance about how it is acting against such activity. The National Association of Human Trafficking Victims says Google should stop all dating ads unless it can guarantee that services are not engaged in trafficking. Meanwhile, video game companies came to an agreement with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to close accounts of registered sex offenders.

• The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is planning a crowdsourcing initiative to speed up its production cycle.

• A survey finds that 82 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of Google.

• Journalism.co.uk spoke to some experts about how to verify content on social media.

• DocumentCloud explained in a blog post its decision to comply with a request to remove a collection of e-mails from its service.

• The New York Times noted that the younger generations of wealthy families with inherited fortunes have turned to technology and startups. Harrison LeFrak, the son of the real estate billionaire Richard LeFrak, recently helped the company RoboteX introduce its robotics technology to the NYPD's bomb squad.

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies have helped to create an application that can warn marine vessels if they are approaching areas inhabited by endangered North Atlantic right whales. The applications uses GPS and other technology to send the latest data about right whale detections, and is overlaid on NOAA digital charts.

• Failure to alert some residents during recent Colorado wildfires was caused in part by the failure of software to recognize some data from Google Maps, the A.P. reported:

  A document released Thursday by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office indicates mapping software used by FirstCall Network Inc. didn't recognize where to map homes listed as being in Morrison. Those homes were placed in an "unknown" category and received no warnings about the fire. They included the home of Ann Appel, who is believed to have died in the blaze.

   

Around the World: Assange; News Corp. hacking; the Internet in fledgling democracies

• Julian Assange testified in front of Britain's Leveson media inquiry and complained that he had been subjected to inaccurate and negative media coverage, and criticized the Press Complaints Commission for inaction. Assange's talk show on Russian television is also set to premiere next week.

• Eastern European hackers are suspected in a data breach of the Utah Health Department that compromised 24,000 U.S. Medicaid files with names, Social Security numbers and other private information.

• News Corp's Sky News admitted it had hacked into e-mails related to the case of a man who had faked his own death, as his wife was facing court for deception. Sky has defended its action as in the "public interest," even though, as the Guardian reported, "intercepting emails is a prima facie breach of the Computer Misuse Act, to which there is no such defence written in law."

• The government of Poland is funding a full set of digital textbooks for schools under a free license.

• A study found that the Internet is more helpful for democratization in countries that have already introduced democratic reforms than in extremely authoritarian countries. The study's authors suggest that countries that could currently benefit from the Internet in this way are Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Singapore and Zambia.

• The rebels who have taken over Mali in a recent coup have a website.

• Anonymous says it has hacked into 500 websites in China.

• Two Tunisians have been jailed for posting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad on Facebook.