Thing 23: Virtual Worlds

1. On your blog entry for Thing 23, discuss some of the potential uses for using a virtual world for public diplomacy kind of event might be applicable to a virtual world?
-- Online game related to American Culture or holiday.
-- Story telling program
-- English Teaching Program
-- Educational Fair.
-- Speaker Program
-- Book discussion program

Can you think of a scenario where a virtual environment might richer experience than a real life environment?Language Learning through virtual world, students could access resource easily to practice speaking and reading, even interactive with English native speakers.

How might academic institutions and libraries use virtual worlds in a different way than real life?
Academic Institutions and Libraries could use virtual worlds to promote learning, reading and researching/discussion. Virtual worlds are more attractive, young people could hide her real identity, and participate in the virtual worlds programs more than real life programs.

2. How might your Embassy use a virtual world environment for a program?
We have virtual American corner, facebook, but we have not tried the virtual world yet.
I think that we may use a virtual world environment to do the following programs.
--Announcing our programs,
-- Conducting a speaker program, the audience could raise questions freely in the virtual world.
-- Organizing an Education fair

Thing 21: Short Message Service (SMS)

For the usage of SMS, we can send out as a program reminder, or holiday notice and new year greeting message to our audience. Usually AIT/PAS sent out the SMS message from Hinet – a local telecom. Here is the Hinet SMS page -




This year we sent out a New Year greeting message to 121 selected IRC electronic outreach services members and IRC colleagues. In the future, we may send out the Questionaire via SMS to collect the feedback

Here is the image.

Thing 22: The Mobile Web

1. Our website shows on Nokia N70 and Sony Ericsson after accessing dobmobi,
Nokia:


Sony Ericsson




For a mobile viewers, people are most interested in the following service at our website:
- Non-immigrant visa applications
- IRC library service
- AIT Press Release

What content would you remove from your regular web site: lots of link could not be accessed, the message is: the requested item could not be loaded (status code 502). and video, photos and graphics, pdf files will be removed.

2. Write down a few ideas you have on how Web-enabled phones will change the services you provide and how public diplomacy will be changed in the future by the wide-spread use of these devices.

-- We may use the web-enabled phone to send out the PR, programs announcement and visa services.

Thing 20: Search Engine Optimization

I used the following terms to describe our programs at American corner, and did search at Google Trends:
-- Literature program
-- Book Discussion ( I also tried the word ”Book Club”)
-- Story telling program (I also tried the word “English story”)
Only English story can not raise any search volume, the other terms have good search volume.



I also limit my search to my country –Taiwan, I have tried several keywords and failed, finally I success by using the term – lecture.




I used the following terms to do search at Google AdWords and Google Insignts
Book Discussion:global Monthly Search Volume is : 49,500. This is the most commonly used keyword.
Literature program:
global monthly search volume is: 4400. Another keyword is used more often is: “Literature”.
Story telling:
Global monthly search volume is: 90500. The better keywords are story and storytelling.

I used “Literature” to do search at Google insights for search, On the topic of “Literature” the most popular search terms in my country are: in literature and west literature.