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"Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air."

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell is a very smart writer with a knack for smart, provocative, "contrarian" statements. One such argument that gets digerati in a tizzy is the idea that social media actually doesn't help bring down oppressive regimes, despite all the hype. That debate is back in the news with the protests in Egypt. We'll say right off the bat that we're skeptics that social media can bring down oppressive regimes. We believe Twitter makes a tangible, positive difference in the real world, but probably not quite at the level of regime change. But Gladwell wrote a blog post yesterday on social media and Egypt that just doesn't make any sense.

Over the past day, Al Jazeera has pushed the issue with its promoted trend and tweets like this, which reads "Like our coverage from #Egypt? Think we should be shown on US TV? It's time to #DemandAlJazeera http://aje.me/demandAJ." Yesterday, clothing outlet Kenneth Cole tried to leverage the popularity of Egypt-related hashtags in a similar manner, tweeting "Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo." Immediately, the company caught a lot of flack for the tweet and shortly after publicly apologized and pulled the tweet. The difference in the two situations, we would think, is that Al Jazeera is trying to leverage the popularity of a specific event to gain entry into a market that has essentially shut it out. The end result might be similar to Kenneth Coles' desired outcome - increased sales - but it would come with the increased spread of information.

The mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone. Enlarge This Image Apparently even during a revolution. That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest." Using complex calculations and vectors representing decision-making by potential protesters, Mr. Hassanpour, who already has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford, studied the recent uprising in Egypt. His question was, how smart was the decision by the government of President Hosni Mubarak to completely shut down the Internet and cellphone service on Jan. 28, in the middle of the crucial protests in Tahrir Square?

The death toll in Egypt so far is over 300, with thousands wounded. Way to jump on a trending #hashtag to push your products, Kenneth Cole.

Oh, and in case you missed it, there is already a parody Kenneth Cole PR Twitter account at http://twitter.com/KennethColePR Hours after its creation, it already has 3,633 followers. Electric speed indeed.

Also of interest: http://twitter.com/#!/dacort/status/33303368441004033 Damon Cortesi posted a screenshot of the KC fan page activity.

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have been dubbed by some to be "Wiki Revolutions" because "just as people can self-organize to contribute to Wikipedia...they can participate in social change and coalesce into revolutionary movements as never before." Now, it seems that wikis may not only be behind toppling governments, but also stripping plagiarizing government officials of their educational titles. This week, German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has said he would remove the "Dr" from his name while a plagiarism investigation of his PhD took place. Where did this investigation originate? Wikia, the for-profit wiki project started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

This is worth reading and thinking about on both a governmental and at an organizational level. As elements in a system become more interdependent, and as the speed and scale of financial, informational, contractual, physical transactions between the elements of a system increase, the system can become more prone to big shocks from relatively small disruptions.  If Churchill said in the age of radio that "..A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on" what would he have said about organizations in the age of mobile devices, Twitter and YouTube?

Journalist and NYU fellow Nir Rosen probably didn't know he was putting his career in jeopardy when he hit send on Twitter yesterday. After all, it was just one of 600-odd tweets he'd sent since joining the social networking site.   Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.   It was probably something the war correspondent would say over a dinner party with buddies. Everyone likes a good joke at the expense of Anderson Cooper, right? The problem is the Twitter dinner party includes the whole world.