Social Media, Explained…Kinda

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I read something recently, but I don’t remember the source. The article explained in a really good way the buzz around “web 2.0″, but cuts through all the junk and really expained the characteristics of social media. Here’s what I remember:

1. Participation: Social Media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. The concepts of “media” and “audience” is blurred.
2. Openness: Social Media services are open to feedback and participiation. They encourage voting, feedback, comments, and sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content.
3. Conversation: Traditional media is about “broadcast”, or content transmitted or distributed to an audience. On the other hand, Social Media is about conversation, two-way or n-way dialogues.
4. Community: Social Media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively around common interests; a political issue, photography, or a myriad of other interest.
5. Connectedness: Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, via links and combining different kids of media in one place.
6. Consumption: Most Social Media is consumed via a technology called “RSS”, which stand for Really Simple Syndication. It’s “Push Technology, which means that when a content is available that you are personally interested in, it is pushed to you instead of you reaching out — visiting the website originating the content — to grab it. This site explains it well and provides a nice graphic:

Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can “subscribe” to a website or blog, and get “fed” all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what’s going on in minutes instead of hours. What a time saver!That one place where your RSS list is created is called an RSS Reader, and it gathers all the headlines from all the websites and blogs you have subscribed to. But first, to “subscribe” to a website or blog’s RSS feed simply means that you are telling that website or blog, “Yes please. Send me your story headlines.” It’s like subscribing to a magazine or newsletter. Instead of getting a magazine or email, you will just get a list of headlines sent to your RSS reader. If the headline looks interesting to you, all you have to do is click on the headline and you’ll be sent to the whole story.

There are several ways in which the characteristics above are manifested on the web. Below are some:

1. Blogs: Blogs are online journals, with entries appearing with the most recent first. Blogs allow for conversation and dialogue via comments, where anybody is allowed to comment on a post; trackbacks, which informs the poster that someone has linked to the post, and pings, which act similarly to trackbacks.
2. Social Networks: These sites allow people to build their own personal profiles and share their content with friends and strangers. There are several verticals in this space: Linkedin is a social network in the job networking space, for example.
3. Content Communities: These are ecosystems organized around a specific type of content. There are communities around photography (Flickr), bookmarks (del.icio.us), and vidoes (YouTube.com). The organization of the content is based on a traditional taxonomy, but also on “folksonomies”, which is a user-generated organizing mechanism, that involves “tagging” a piece of content with keywords that are descriptive of that content.
4. Wikis: These sites allow anybody to add or edit information on them; a communal document or database is the result.
5. Podcasts: Are Audio or Video files, published on the web that anybody can subscribe to.

The explanation above is much more helpful, at least to me, than the incessant use of “web 2.0″ jargon that is not descriptive and wreaks of marketing hype.

	This post was written by Pete Abilla