.Cal J-Student Twitters His Way Out of Egyptian Jail

Great, great story in today’s Oakland Tribune, about a Berkeley journalism student who was arrested while covering a raucous demonstration in Egypt, but used Twitter to arouse global protests that got him sprung 24 hours later. When James Karl Buck got snatched by the Egyptian police, he twittered one word: “arrested,” and his friends in the J-school and the Egyptian dissident community immediately mobilized. Cal got him a lawyer pronto, the US embassy intervened, and the Associated Press and the International Herald Tribune started making phone calls. Unfortunately, Buck’s interpreter, an Egyptian veterinary medicine student, still languishes in a cell. But this is right up there with the South by Southwest “Twitter revolt.” IM junkies of the world, unite!