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.

Thing 19 Website Usage Statistics

The top 5 sites in Taiwan.
1. Yahoo! yahoo.com Personalized content and search options. Chatrooms, free e-mail, clubs, and pager.
2. 無名小站 wretch.ccPhoto Album and Blog 網路相簿及網路日誌
3. Facebook facebook.comA social utility that connects people, to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos.
4. Google繁體中文搜尋 google.com.tw提供網路、新聞、圖片等搜索服務。特色包括 PageRank 網頁排行榜、頁庫存檔、搜尋結果翻譯及類似網頁查尋。
5. YouTube - Broadcast yourself youtube.comYouTube is a way to get your videos to the people who matter to you. Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!

The top social networking platform in Taiwan is: Facebook.

I have also set up an account at google Analytics:

Thing 18: What new with the search engines

1. Create your own custom search engine using Google Custom Search.

I have creared an search engine on "DVD/VCD procurement", I am in charge of acquisition, in the past, I usually went to each website to check, if a specific dvd is available on which sites. No I combined lots of sites and create my own custom search engine.
http://www.deltamac.com.tw/
http://www.questar1.com/
http://sh1.obuy.tw/gull/item_ca...
http://dsc.discovery.com/
http://www.pbs.org/




2. On your blog, indicate which of Google's search options you liked best, and if you found any semantic search engines that were interesting, and why.

For Semantics search engines, I like True Knowledge best.

Thing 17: Books 2.0

I have read the following three resources ~~`

LitLovers : this site provide lots of reading guides for popular and classic literature books. And it even provides information on how to discuss a book, start and run a book club. Since our American Corner has a book club, I may try to apply the tips from the blog to our American Corner book club. It can also help me select books for our American Corners.

BooksInMyPhone~~ I have been wanting to read books on my cell phone. So I explore this website and downloaded one book, but the book I downloaded has a security flaw, so I have to delete.

NetLibrary~~ The net library provide multi-language choices, so I can choose Chinese to read the web, it has more 3000 e-books.

LibriVox ~~ I have found some audio books from this site, I can even find some classic Chinese documents, the audio for the Chinese classic documents sound very odd, speak too fast, hardly to understand, I also try to change the speed, but still odd. I also found some audio books in English, the voice sound just OK and clear enough to understand.


I have installed Worldcat application at my Facebook. Because I am a technical librarian, so this function will be very useful to me.
I have run a search on “the age of Innocence” and the full bibliographic data shown. It also provides vendor information and readers’ reviews. I can use the data for acquisition and cataloging purpose. Not all of my country libraries are listed on the library list. So I can not find a copy of "The age of Innocence" at Taiwan library in Worldcat.

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