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The State Department has ventured down various online paths to engage the world online, but some are more noteworthy than others. Not surprisingly, State has jumped on the Facebook, Twitter YouTube and Flickr bandwagons, but it's also running a social networking site and official public diplomacy site. The Department's acting director for digital communications and senior Web manager, Daniel Schaub, said that these sites have seen a threefold increase in traffic since President Obama's inauguration.

Here's a rundown of some of the more innovative ways the State Department is aiming to engage the international community via the Internet.

America.gov: This is the official State Department public diplomacy site, administered by the Bureau of International Information Programs. Launched January 2008, it is published in seven languages and has been quickly adding multimedia and interactive components, such as blogs, Web chats and videos. It receives about 28 million page views per month. This site sees substantially more traffic than the more official (and less interactive) Department site and the Dipnotes blog, which see roughly 19 million and 450,000 page views per month, respectively.

ExchangesConnect: The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs runs this social networking site, launched in October 2008. It boasts 7,500 members, mostly youth. Its traffic, while still rather low, has seen a sizable jump (from 15,800 visits per month in December to 23,500 in January). It's also doing a good job targeting an international audience: The visits have come from 170 different countries. The site features discussion forums, groups, and video and photo galleries that members can add to and comment on. The content is largely youth-focused; the most-watched video, titled "Culturiffic," which has seen almost 8,500 views, features images of Pakistani culture set to "Americanized" music.

Alliance of Youth Movements: This is a coalition made up of 17 public and private organizations, including the State Department, Howcast, Google and Columbia Law School, aimed at steering young people away from extremism by using online tools. It's modeled after "One million voices against FARC," a virtual group started on Facebook by Oscar Morales in Colombia. In a two-day conference in New York in early December, the organizations came together to discuss online social activism. There's now talk of the alliance establishing itself as a nonprofit organization.

Digital Outreach Team: This is a team made up of a dozen State officials who log on to Arabic, Persian and Urdu discussion forums to defend the government's position on contentious foreign policy issues. Created in November 2006 under the leadership of former Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, the team is vastly understaffed but has had some early successes. After an adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad debated with a digital outreach team member on a Persian discussion forum, the adviser posted the debate on his Web site and it was ultimately published in an Iranian newspaper.

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