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The pope does it. Obama does it. So last week I finally decided to open a personal Twitter account to “join the conversation,” as friends had urged. I signed up to follow some of them, and others in the foreign-policy community¸ and then waited for something to happen.

It soon did. It was a tweet on Friday that first alerted the world to the killings in Norway. It did not take long before thousands of #Norway and #Oslo tweets were voicing their thoughts and spreading the views of the experts from the mainstream media and the blogs across the twittersphere. From the Washington Post and New York Times to the BBC, the working theory was that there was a link to the Muslim extremists of al Qaeda. I retweeted to my 17 followers a piece by Max Fisher from The Atlantic on “Al Qaeda’s problem with Norway,” despite my better judgment and the caution of the local police, who would later announce that the suspect was a Norwegian.

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