Overview of the social media landscape.

1. Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, Prepared by WalkSign Consulting. Special thanks: WikiMedia,Whatis?,
Social Media Primer and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and quot;buildingquot; of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings. and the New Oxford American Dictionary.
A social network is a social Social network analysis has now moved from being a suggestive metaphor to an analytic approach to a paradigm, with its own theoretical statements, methods and A social network service uses
structure made of nodes (which are research tribes. Analysts reason from whole to part; from structure to relation to individual; from behavior to attitude. They either study whole networks, all of the ties software to build online social
generally individuals or containing specified relations in a defined population, or personal networks, the ties that specified people have, such as their quot;personal communitiesquot;. networks for communities of people
organizations) that are tied by one Several analytic tendencies distinguish social network analysis: who share interests and activities or
or more specific types of who are interested in exploring the
There is no assumption that groups are the building blocks of society: the approach is open to studying less-bounded social systems, from nonlocal communities to links
interdependency, such as values, interests and activities of others.
among Web sites.
visions, idea, financial exchange, Most services are primarily web-based
Rather than treating individuals (persons, organizations, states) as discrete units of analysis, it focuses on how the structure of ties affects individuals and their relationships.
friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, and provide a collection of various
In contrast to analyses that assume that socialization into norms determines behavior, network analysis looks to see the extent to which the structure and composition of ties
trade, web links, sexual relations, ways for users to interact, such as
affect norms.
disease transmission chat, messaging, email, video, voice
The shape of a social network helps determine a network's usefulness to its individuals. Smaller, tighter networks can be less useful to their members than networks with lots
(epidemiology), or airline routes. chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion
of loose connections (weak ties) to individuals outside the main network. More open networks, with many weak ties and social connections, are more likely to introduce new
The resulting structures are often groups, and so on.
ideas and opportunities to their members than closed networks with many redundant ties. In other words, a group of friends who only do things with each other already share
very complex. Individuals = Nodes = Connections = Social Network
the same knowledge and opportunities. A group of individuals with connections to other social worlds is likely to have access to a wider range of information. It is better for Social networking has revolutionized
Social media can take many Syndication individual success to have connections to a variety of networks rather than many connections within a single network. Similarly, individuals can exercise influence or act as the way we communicate and share
different forms, including Internet brokers within their social networks by bridging two networks that are not directly linked (called filling structural holes). information with one another in
Advocates of quot;Web 2.0quot; may regard syndication of site
forums, message boards, weblogs, today's society. Various social
content as a Web 2.0 feature, involving as it does
wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, networking websites are being used
standardized protocols, which permit end-users to make use
Technologies include: blogs,
picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-
of a site's data in another context (such as another website, Sites/Tech. Shaping Social Networking organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on
the Internet with the help of metadata.
by millions of people every day on a
regular basis and it now seems that
a browser plugin, or a separate desktop application).
postings, email, instant messaging, social networking is a part of everyday
Protocols which permit syndication include RSS (Really
music-sharing, crowd-sourcing, and life. The main types of social
Simple Syndication — also known as quot;web syndicationquot;), Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs,
voice over IP, to name a few. networking services are those which
RDF (as in RSS 1.1), and Atom, all of them XML-based
Examples of social media contain directories of some categories
formats. Observers have started to refer to these
applications are Google Groups A tag is a (relevant) keyword or term associated with or (such as former classmates), means
technologies as quot;Web feedquot; as the usability of Web 2.0
(reference, social networking), assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic to connect with friends (usually with
evolves and the more user-friendly Feeds icon supplants the
Wikipedia (reference), MySpace map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item self-description pages), and
RSS icon.
(social networking), Facebook and enabling keyword-based classification and search of recommender systems linked to trust.
(social networking), Last.fm Specialized protocols
information. Popular methods now combine many
(personal music), YouTube (social Specialized protocols such as FOAF and XFN (both for
Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by item of these, with MySpace and Facebook
networking and video sharing), social networking) extend the functionality of sites or permit
author/creator or by its consumer/viewers/community. Tags being the most widely used in North
Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr end-users to interact without centralized websites.
(photo sharing), Twitter (social
Aggregation Styles are Changing
Permalinks are typically used for resources such as computer files, web
pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks (both in social
America,[1] Bebo[2], MySpace,
Skyrock Blog , Facebook and Hi5 in
networking and microblogging) and
bookmarking services, and in the current generation of web parts of Europe,[3], Orkut and Hi5 in
other microblogs are Jaiku and
Pownce. Many of these social RSS Feeds browsers - see Flock). For this reason, quot;taggingquot; has become South America and Central America,[4]
associated with the Web 2.0 buzz. Friendster, Orkut and CyWorld in Asia
media services can be integrated
and the Pacific Islands.[5]
via Social network aggregation Web 2.0 Companies
platforms like Mybloglog, a Yahoo Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary An Internet forum is a web application
property, and Plaxo. company of Amazon.com that is best known for operating a for holding discussions and posting
website that provides information on web traffic to other user-generated content.
Different Than Traditional websites. Quantcast is another such firm. Internet forums are also commonly
Social media or social networking In communication, media (Singular: Modern communication media Web 2.0 is a term describing the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that referred to as Web forums, message
(one example of social media) has Medium) are the storage and now allow for intense long- aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These boards, discussion boards,
a number of characteristics that transmission tools used to store distance exchanges between concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, (electronic) discussion groups,
make it fundamentally different and deliver information or data. It is larger numbers of people (many- such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general- discussion forums, bulletin boards,
from traditional media such as often referred to as synonymous to-many communication via e- O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.[2][3] Although the term suggests a new version of the World purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. fora (the Latin plural) or simply
newspapers, television, books, and with mass media or news media, mail, Internet forums). On the Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways [1] It is classified as an extensible language because it allows forums. The terms quot;forumquot; and quot;boardquot;
radio. Primarily, social media but may refer to a single medium other hand, many traditional software developers and end-users use the Web. its users to define their own elements. Its primary purpose is may refer to the entire community or to
depends on interactions between used to communicate any data for broadcast media and mass to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different a specific sub-forum dealing with a
people as the discussion and any purpose. media favor one-to-many According to Tim O'Reilly: information systems, particularly via the Internet,[2] and it is distinct topic. Messages within these
integration of words builds shared- communication (television, used both to encode documents and to serialize data. sub-forums are then displayed either in
“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as
meaning, using technology as cinema, radio, newspaper, chronological order or as threaded
platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”
a conduit. or magazines). discussions.