1. Introduction
　　When talking with others, we use all of our natural channels i.e., not only spoken words but also embodied expressions such as facial expressions, gestures, way of speech (speed, loudness, pitch, etc.), pose, gaze, finger pointing, interpersonal distances, and body touch. By using these conversation channels, we are not merely exchanging messages and opinions, but also trying to build a social context, such as interpersonal relationships. If we can successfully make an adequate social relationship with others, we can more easily share our intentions and feelings in the social context. Therefore, brief and logical expressions often do not suffice for everyday conversations. To accomplish smoother communication and more appealing presentations, redundant and complex but natural and impressive expressions made by combining multiple channels are important.
　　Today's wide spread of information technology increases our chance of communications in text through, for example, e-mail, Internet forums, and blogs. However text communication often causes miscommunications. Because we can use almost no channel other than words in text communication, we often omit the social context that is necessary to understand each other, and instead reflect it through superficial impressions or logical interpretations of the words. As a result, we often get involved in unsocial and unproductive discussions called "flaming," and are forced to spend a long time making well-considered sentences to avoid "flaming." In future development of an advanced information society, it is very important to consider how to support the social context of conversation that is lacking in current text communication.

2. Animation Characters as Social Media
　　It is easy for people to distinguish between media displayed on TV or a PC and real life. Although they know that media is not a person, they intuitively tend to behave socially and naturally towards media in practice [1]. Above all, animation characters are media that make people behave more socially and naturally because of their human-like appearance and behaviors [2].
　　As a result of an experiment that compared conversations mediated by plain text and animation characters, we found that animation characters help people identify the senders of the messages [3]. This result indicates that people can easily interpret each message in a social and familiar manner as an episode of each animation character. Thus, animation characters are a type of social media that hold considerable promise for supporting social and natural online communication.

3. TelMeA Theatre
　　TelMeA Theatre (Fig. 1) provides an online community service on the World Wide Web. The main advantage of TelMeA Theatre is its animation characters, which present the messages of the users. Although the animation characters of TelMeA Theatre are similar to what is called avatars in virtual chatting spaces, TelMeA Theatre is more like an Internet forum than an avatar systems, because the users of TelMeA Theatre do not compose and post their messages in real time. Fig. 2 shows the conversation process in TelMeA Theatre. The users can post their messages to the TelMeA Theatre server and then the messages automatically become available to all other users. In contrast to Internet forums, the users of TelMeA Theatre do not compose simple text messages, but combine various types of expressions, such as inserting spoken lines, adding animated acts, regulating inter-character distances, opening and citing web pages, and pointing at images on the web pages, to make the scripts for their own characters. Fig. 3 shows the script editor window. For example, if a user pushes the "add speech" button on the top of the editor, a component with a text area for a speech line and a menu for selecting its speech type as a verb (like says, asserts, agrees, promises, etc.) is added (Fig. 4). If a user selects a verb from the menu, a list of his/her character's animation associated with the verb is shown (Fig. 4). By selecting one from the list, the user can create the character with animation while saying the speech line with a synthesized voce.
　　TelMeA Theatre prepares five types of expressions other than "speech": "feeling", "attitude", "citing web page", "updating image file", and "pointing at an image." The users of TelMeA Theatre can combine these types of expressions to compose their natural and social expressions.

4. TelMeA Theatre Concept
　　When the "scripts" of the animation characters are made on the editor, they are sent to the TelMeA Theatre server. Then, they are formatted in a proprietary XML scheme. One of the benefits of recording scripts in an XML format is the high availability for content recycling. In the case of making attractive presentation content or educational materials designed in the form of a dialogue by multiple characters, the use of XML format allows TelMeA Theatre to easily prepare templates of such dialogues or users can easily quote other users' scripts in their content. In other words, it can recycle character dialog content.
　　Another benefit of the XML format is the automatic analysis of social conversations made through various character expressions. Conversation log data from TelMeA Theatre includes data about the conversation's structure, that is, for instance, by whom, for whom or for which web content, how (contents of speech and kinds of character animations), and with what intention (which can be extracted by the user's selection of type of speech, feeling, and attitude) it was made. By analyzing the structure of conversations and quantifying the kinds of intentions and expressions used in the conversation, we think we can calculate human relationships and reputations in the community without analyzing the exact meanings of words. We call this method "Social Summarization [5]" and are conducting research on the high-quality analysis of social conversation based on embodied expressions.

5. Conclusions and Future work
　　Here, I have explained the meaning of animation characters from the viewpoint of online social communication and an application system called TelMeA Theatre. TelMeA Theatre has been translated into English and Dutch. We have a partnership with a venture company to make a business with TelMeA Theatre as a web application service 1). Furthermore, under the framework of research collaboration, we were introduced TelMeA Theatre into several online communities and are collecting practical data. These communities include KidsPlanet 2), which is administered by a Dutch internet service provider called the Planet Media Group, and e-Kyoshitsu 3), which is a Japanese e-learning community organized by an NPO of working high- school teachers and academic researchers. Through the practice of working with communities and analyzing such data, we aim to build a theory of the social aspects of communication and contribute to developing technology that supports the social aspects of human-human and human-media interactions.