Both events are far from equal importance but both of them are fundamentally influenced by social media...

From the terrible attacks in Mumbai to the Belgian Minister of Defense's defense about his time usage and behaviour in New York, social media are changing more than just the speed of information.

In the case of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai it were technologies like Twitter and mobile phones who covered these terrible events as they happened and even "corrected" news items wrongly communicated by the press. (See more about this here).

In the case of Minister De Crem it is a single blogster in New York who initiated questions in the Belgian Parliament, which then (presumably) led to the blogster in question getting fired and definitely led to the Minister calling "blogging" a dangerous phenomenon. (See story here).

And although there are questions about unchecked rumours being propagated through Twitter or about the fact that anyone "is free to publish whatever he or she wants on blogs at will without taking any responsibility"... it comes down to one thing; the world and the way we share information has changed forever.

We share information immediately, glocally and in a syndicated fashion... From tweet to blogpost to SMS in a click. From online to offline to mainstream in just a couple of minutes.

I can understand that some people, companies and governments are getting very nervous about this but let's face it, it will not change back to how it was.

My advise; listen, learn, do and embrace it with respect.