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Approach 1: The Internet is a revolutionary leap forward for the exchange of ideas and free markets. Direct or indirect censorship could stifle this great resource. No single creation has revolutionized the human existence the way the Internet has.

For the first time in human history, we live in an era of true knowledge. In this modern-day Library of Alexandria , there exists instant access to a vast wealth of knowledge on virtually any subject, available to any individual who seeks it.

We have the opportunity to be informed in a variety of mediums previously unavailable. From text to video, laypeople to experts, this revolutionary presence of information is the essential foundation for the presence of an informed global population.

We are now a single civilization, no longer separated by geographic concerns, united on a digital plane in a manner unprecedented in human history. The Internet allows for a truly flat world; individuals in China may be communicated with just as easily as texting a next-door neighbor.

And this age of immediacy demands more from every participant of this global civilization. The Internet calls for information to be more thorough, more accurate, more eloquent and easily understood. It demands that the information of tomorrow be available today and hails those who deliver our needs.

Most importantly, however, the Internet is the first truly interactive medium of information. Just as our knowledge may be instantly updated, we have the opportunity to immediately respond to its authors and to our peers. The knowledge we keep on the Internet has the opportunity not only to be published, but to be consistently and persistently responded to, altered and viewed in new lights.

The global economy may be built on a free exchange of goods, but global knowledge the Internet is built on the free exchange of ideas, where any mind may come and freely discuss any number of subjects.

To allow a governing force to mandate what may and may not be present on the Internet is to inherently quiet the uncensored exchange of ideas it allows.

Any form of censorship, whether from special-interest groups, concerned citizens or an appointed group, destroys the most valuable characteristic of the Internet.

Without censorship, any voice, any thought, any mind has an equal opportunity to be recognized, to be heard, to be understood. To place restrictions on what may be published on the Internet is for us to decide that some minds are less valuable than others, that some voices do not deserve to be so loud.

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Censorship would hinder the Internet revolution

By: Emma Thomasson. Reuters October 26, 2012 6:31 PM

InterAksyon.com The online news portal of TV5

It looks like mission control: in a Swiss market town, an array of screens in Nestle's headquarters tracks online sentiment. Executives watch intently as California wakes up, smells the coffee - and says whether it likes it.

This is the nerve centre of the company's Digital Acceleration Team. By monitoring conversation about its products on social media - right down to "realtime recipe tweets" across the United States - they aim to win over a sometimes hostile world.

Other companies, such as PepsiCo, Danone and Unilever, have exploited the opportunities to promote themselves online. But Nestle is also concentrating on using social media for damage limitation.

Vilified for years for its sales of baby milk formula in developing countries, Nestle today is confronting its critics online as protesters find newer targets, such as the company's $7 billion a year bottled water business. The $200 billion food and beverage group set up its digital team a year ago, and says it has doubled spending on social media advertising in the last couple of years.

"People have been complaining about companies forever, but before they did it at the water cooler or at the bar," said Bernhard Warner, co-founder of London-based consultancy Social Media Influence. "Now they are doing it online and spreading their complaints to disparate communities."

Nestle is not the only bottled water producer under fire. Others including Coca-Cola are also accused of undermining public water systems. Groups such as Boston-based Corporate Accountability International, a non-profit which originated in the protests against Nestle's infant formula, have alleged for almost a decade that bottled water makers damage the environment when they extract the water, waste resources on bottles and shipping, and take what should be a common good.

The fight matters a lot to Nestle, as it's the world's largest producer of bottled water. Its brands include Poland Spring, Perrier and San Pellegrino and accounted for almost 8 percent of its sales of 83.6 billion Swiss francs ($85.31 billion) in 2011.

In 2008 it ran an advertisement in Canada claiming that "bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world." Campaigners in North America have nonetheless persuaded tens of thousands of people to sign a "Think outside the bottle" pledge to drink water from the tap, and pushed some U.S. campuses and municipal buildings to ban the bottled variety.

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VIDEOS | At Nestle, social media is used to track sentiments, spot trouble, control damage

By Ryan Holmes, contributor

FORTUNE -- Houston, we have a tweet.Growing numbers of global organizations -- from Gatorade to Dell and major universities -- are building multimillion-dollar mission control centers for social media: dedicated physical hubs for monitoring and responding to the torrent of social commentary and queries flooding in via Facebook, Twitter and other channels. Decked out with giant flat panel screens, sleek mood lighting and banks of monitors, the command centers track a dizzying array of real-time stats and indicators, from mentions on Twitter to general consumer sentiment and social media market share.

The glitziest of the bunch would give NASA a run for its money. Dell's social media ground control and command center in Round Rock, Texas, has a total of 70 employees monitoring social conversations from around the globe, according to ReadWriteWeb. Scanning Facebook (FB), Twitter and other networks, the team processes 25,000 daily social media events about Dell (DELL) in 11 different languages, responding to most queries and complaints within 24 hours.

While not every company is swamped with thousands of social media mentions, even mid-sized businesses and brands are facing increasingly daunting demands from social-savvy customers, says Altimeter business analyst Charlene Li in a recent post. "Today, 66% of online Americans are actively using social networking, but only 16% of companies use social media to engage with customers," Li says. "You cannot have credibility saying you are customer-centric if you ignore your customers in social media channels."

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With consumers flooding social media, and companies integrating Facebook and Twitter into business strategy, command centers are becoming standard equipment. Applications range from tracking ad campaigns and monitoring community engagement to handling crisis management. Gatorade pioneered the social command concept in 2010, deploying a mission control center in its Chicago headquarters with six reporting screens and space for five workers. Today, they use it to analyze product reception and connect followers with star athletes via Twitter. Earlier this year, the Red Cross launched a digital operations center staffed by three people to reach out to victims during natural disasters, with modules displaying everything from posts by people seeking family members to recent press coverage. AndClemson University recently developed a social listening center where students monitor a half-dozen screens, pooling data for, among other purposes, research on how to better respond to campus emergencies.

Behind the sudden command center craze is a serious case of data overload. Social technologies have given companies access to an unprecedented flood of new analytics, metrics and user data. But making sense of it all has been a challenge. Underneath the hood, command centers are wired to analyze millions of social conversations from not just Facebook and Twitter, but YouTube (GOOG), LinkedIn (LNKD), blogs and more. Results are spit out onto wall-mounted screens customized with dozens of different modules -- colorful charts and graphs tracking everything from retweets and Facebook Likes to buzz in the blogosphere and overall consumer sentiment. At a glance, teams can take in social trends from thousands of users that would otherwise require hours, if not days, to sort through.

During the 2012 Super Bowl, organizers set up a massive 2,800-square-foot social media ground control in downtown Indianapolis, outfitted with 150 square feet of networked screen space and more than a mile of ethernet cable. For more than two weeks, 50 experts logged 15-hour days inside, sorting through some 64 million social impressions. On average, they responded to questions within three minutes. The payoff? By providing real-time answers to queries on everything from parking availability to half-time shows while also amplifying fan feedback, the command center generated $3.2 million in positive press and a 12.5% boost in consumer sentiment.

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"[Organizations] are monitoring online conversations about their brands, reacting instantly to viral buzz and creating companies that consumers feel involved in -- and, in some cases, even bringing in bigger profits as a direct result," says Intel (INTC)social media strategist Ekaterina Walter in a recent Fast Company article. The latest generation of command centers is already taking this a step further. (Full disclosure: my company provides software,HootSuite Command Center, which powers these kinds of nerve centers.)

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NASA-style mission control centers for social media are taking off

The first time you launch the app, you'll be asked to "fill out your card" by typing your name, phone number, and e-mail address. Attach a photo, if you wish, to this virtual card.

Now, you can transfer that information and get the same in return at a "light fist bump," as instructed, with anyone else running the Bump app.

You can also pass along information from others in your phone's contact list, or with photos stored on your phone.

The app has a novel way, too, of bumping photos to a laptop or desktop computer. With a bump of the phone against your space bar, the app sends pictures to a website, http://bu.mp, from which you can drag and drop them to any PC folder. The caveat here is that the process works over the Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers, but not via Internet Explorer.

When you can't escape the material world, ScanBizCards Lite, free from ScanBiz Mobile Solutions L.P., lets you take photos of old-fashioned cardboard business cards and send the information on them into your address book.

The app, for Android and Apple devices, detects a slew of printed languages, including in the Greek and Russian alphabets.

The Lite version of ScanBizCards allows you to save only five cards a week to your address book, but unlimited card-scanning is possible. A "premium" edition of the app, which allows unlimited card-saving, costs $6.99.

A free app called ooVoo Video Chat can, among other things, make an iPod Touch work like a video telephone among users of the app. It also works on other Apple and Android mobile devices.

For networking, the software, by ooVoo L.L.C., can conference up to 12 video callers, although 12 Chiclet-size faces, all with squinting eyes, on a smartphone screen could be a bit tedious to watch. (With Skype and a similar video-chat plug in for Google+Hangouts, you can conference up to 10 users).

For desktop use, ooVoo has PC and Mac versions.

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Apptitude: Enhanced social networking, via app

Rajkot, Oct 26 (ANI): Ahead of the Gujarat assembly polls, political parties have started using social networking sites for campaigning in the state.

The president of the Rajkot unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Dhansukh Bhanderi, said through social media pages they are providing information about their party and the development work undertaken by the government in the last five years.

"The Rajkot unit of Bharatiya Janata Party has started using social networking websites for campaigning in the forthcoming assembly elections. Our party has connected with 25,000 people through these sites. We provide them the information about our programmes and about the Gujarat government through facebook, twitter and mobile phones. We also provide information about the development work that is being carried out by chief minister Narendra Modi," said Bhanderi.

Bhanderi added that through these social websites, they are trying to connect with the youth and women.

"We will definitely benefit by using information technology for campaigning, as these sites are extensively used by the youth and women. In order to ensure that the youth and the women support us, we are using this technology," added Bhanderi.

However, the president of Rajkot unit of the Congress Party, Indranil Rajyaguru, said he is inviting the youth to visit his page and read about his ideas before casting their votes for him.

"There are youth, who stay in touch with me on Facebook and if they want to know about me, they can get the information from my Facebook page. I invite them to join me on my Facebook page to understand my ideas before casting their votes for me," said Rajyaguru.

The first phase of the Gujarat assembly polls will be held on December 13, while the second will be held on December 17. Counting of votes will take place on December 20.

Over 35,000 troopers from the paramilitary forces and at least 55,000 state police personnel are likely to be deployed for the upcoming Gujarat polls.

Gujarat has 182 assembly constituencies, 13 of which are reserved for Scheduled Caste (SC) and 26 for Scheduled Tribe (ST) with 3.78 crore voters who waiting to exercise their franchise after being ruled by Modi for over a decade. (ANI)

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Social media a new site for Gujarat election campaigning