"By many accounts, the horrible treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers and mercenaries has been going on ever since the end of the invasion," notes Dan Gillmor. "The Red Cross warned U.S. officials a year ago. Yet it took those appalling photographs to turn this into the huge story that it's become.

San Francisco Chronicle reporter David Lazarus is questioning whether Marc Bien, who he interviewed as telecommunications giant SBC's vice-president of corporate communications (as Bien's business cards indicate) broke ethical guidelines when he neglected to tell Lazarus that he's actually an employee of major PR firm Fleishman-Hillard.

"As Howard Rheingold, who literally wrote the book, Smart Mobs, says: 'Civilizations jump in complexity whenever a threshold for collective action is lowered. It's not just street protestors. It's science, democracy, markets, the way people meet and mate, the way people use cities and the way motor vehicles use roadways that are affected ... when mobile communication and pervasive computing enable new forms of collective action,'" Brad deGraf writes for AlterNet. "'Wikis' have become the participatory writing tool of choice, and have revolutionized online collaboration.