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.

Hillary Clinton has been talking up online diplomacy, as Micah Sifry and Nancy Scola reported in this space, and her husband is getting in on the act, too.

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.

Citizen-journalists chosen by Decision '08, contest for "Why are you a Democrat/Republican," what do pollworkers of the 21st Century look like?, fears of security threats at the Democratic National Convention, Twitter scandal erupts over fake "speakerpelosi" account, and coded messages directed at Evangelicals in John McCain's "The One" ad.

The Tuesday night ritual of gathering around the electronic campfire to share in the evolving politics of the 2008 presidential race may finally be over, at least until November. Here are some snapshots and observations from tonight.

A Digg-style site lets Obama supporters make suggestions to the campaign; a video of a Young Hillary Clinton; who, exactly, are these online Republicans we hear about?; Click 4 Obama makes a political FreeRice site; Causes posts some big numbers; and the RNC launches a Obama Iraq countdown clock.

A fake superdelegate on YouTube; Hillary can't catch a break online; Grover Norquist shows up in the RNC's "Can We Ask" campaign; graphic designers get out the vote; John McCain shores up his tech policy; a McCain adviser answers Wired readers' questions; Hillary's t-shirt contest enters the voting stage; Ron Paul's been employing tons of family members; and a Member of Congress uses Qik.

The Next Right launches; is Slatecard the "Republican ActBlue"?; Hillary Clinton's bad day; it's the network, stupid; Barack Obama is the jukebox favorite; Al Franken continues to get hounded by bloggers; Newt Gingrich hints at a 2012 or 2016 run; and Hillary and Barack dance in Puerto Rico.

A new song wants to convince John McCain to fire the lobbyists working for his campaign; the DNCC blog dust-up continues; The Next Right is set to launch next week; a catalog of robo-calls from around the country; the ultimate "nightmare ticket"; two funny, meaningless bits of web-detritus; a forum on Online Political Participation at NYU in June; buy a Barack Obama and Raul Castro tea set from the RNC; analyzing Obama and McCain's SEO skillz; an analysis of McCain's new web site; and an Alaska Senatorial candidate pledges to post his calendar online.

A new Republican group swears web domination is all about the right tools; the presidential race is the best example of the impact of blogging on politics, says Technorati; Jose Antonio Vargas gets introspective about online politics; the DNC credentialing process is on the verge of becoming a fiasco; Second Life attacks made real in Russia; Google News and Google Earth offer cool possibilities; a new, smooth pro-Obama tune; McCain says none more black!; Hillary Tweets more, conducts blog outreach; and British PM reaches out to constituents on YouTube.