Revolutions aren’t what they used to be. Connectedness has changed everything. News and analysis of historic events now unfolds in modules of minutes/hours, not months/years. And it is delivered by instantaneous media; no waiting for the history books to be written.

Here’s some history — news and analysis — from the past 24 hours:

NEWS: Egyptian army won’t fire on protesters: The Egyptian army announced on Monday it would not fire on the tens of thousands of protesters calling for President Mubarak to step down. An army spokesperson made the announcement on state TV saying, “freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody”.

ANALYSIS: This almost certainly means the end of the Mubarak regime, because without uncompromising army support the president has no power base.

NEWS: Syria’s president talks about reforms, but claims his country is stable: The Middle East is diseased with stagnation and its leaders must “upgrade” themselves and their societies to keep up with the demands of their people, Syrian President Bashir al-Assad said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.”Real reform is about how to open up society and how to start dialogue,” he said, insisting that “Syria is stable … because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.”

ANALYSIS: Another Middle East dictator, desperately watching the dominos fall around him, tries to defend his own position, which may well prove to be, like that of his co-dictators, indefensible.

NEWS: Google invents a technology to help Egyptian demonstrators: Over the past weekend Google’s boffins came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service — the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on an international phone number and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. “We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time,” Google engineers said on their blog.

ANALYSIS: How can repressive regimes, fighting a popular uprising, compete with this kind of real-time technology innovation?

Imagine how the French or Russian revolutions would have unfolded, in speed and outcome, in a world of speak-to-tweet.

CRIKEY: Apologies for the tardiness of the Daily Mail over the last two days. We’ve been battling technical difficulties, but in a sign of our undying dedication to you loyal reader, we’ve managed to assemble our daily publication with a combination of sticky tape, bubble gum, spit and moxy.