Social Media in Plain English

I know this is somewhat out of order (unless you consider all Web 2.0 stuff to be "social media") - Common Craft has released another great explanatory video.




Take a look!

2.0 Alphabet

is for reddit, where users submit links to content and then vote on the links, so the most popular items bubble to the top. Similar sites are Digg.com and Newsvine. A study released in September 2007 by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed a wide divergence in what the so-called "mainstream media" considers to be important and what "the masses" perceive as worthy of attention. This is proof.

"The site has discussion areas in which users may discuss the posted links and vote for or against others' comments. When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default, although a reader can display it through a link or preference. Users who submit articles which other users like and subsequently "vote up" receive "karma" points as a reward for submitting interesting articles."[Wikipedia]

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 2 (letters N-Z) were originally published in Information Today 24.10 (Nov 2007): p.15(2).

2.0 Alphabet

is for Last.fm, which "taps the wisdom of the crowds, leveraging each user's musical profile to make personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams, and much more." Listen online. Yes, it's very cool; CBS liked it so much that it bought the site last May.

Last.fm is a UK-based internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 21 million active users based in more than 200 countries.[1] On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m (US$280m).
Using a music recommendation system known as "Audioscrobbler," Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user's computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rightsholder has previously authorised it. Registration is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations. [Wikipedia]

The Charms of Wikipedia

"Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it's a fast-paced game of paintball." Nicholson Baker

Take a look Nicholson Baker's latest - The Charms of Wikipedia [New York Review of Books, March 20, 2008] in which he reviews the new book Wikipedia: the Missing Manual by John Broughton. He also gives a few of his opinions too.

2.0 Alphabet

is for Furl , from Look-Smart (remember them?). It's kind of like an online filing cabinet that lets you save, store, and share Web pages of interest. As with del.icio.us, you can get an RSS feed of the most popular items that people are currently Furling.

Furl is a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us or Simpy, Furl enables members to bookmark, annotate, and share web pages. Topics are used to categorize saved sites, similar to the tagging feature of other social websites. Additionally, a user may write comments, save clippings, assign each bookmark a rating and keywords (which are given greater weight while searching), and have an option of private or public storage for each topic or item archived.
Considered one of its main features, Furl also privately archives a complete copy of the html of each page that a user bookmarks, making it accessible even if the original content is modified or removed, an antidote for link rot. This also allows full text searches to be made within the archive. However, as highlighted under limitations below, images that are embedded using links are not archived with user's copy of the html page, so images may disappear over time. [Wikipedia]

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 1 (letters A - M) were originally published in Information Today 24.9 (Oct 2007): p.17(2).

2.0 Alphabet

is for del.icio.us, "social bookmarking" for the great unwashed (e.g., everybody else). This is the 1,000-pound gorilla of social bookmarking sites (for some reason, I always have trouble spelling this one). If you're a voyeur or just want to make sure you don't miss anything cool/interesting/useful, snag the RSS feed from the front page to see what people are bookmarking right now. del.icio.us is part of the Yahoo! family of sites, along with Flickr, the iconic Web 2.0 photo-sharing site.

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community.
  Discover new things.
• Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.


We'll spend a great deal of time discussing social bookmarking and tagging in session #10 - Social Bookmarking, Tagging & Folksonomies.

Web 2.0 Alpbahet:Part 1 (letters A - M) were originally published in Information Today 24.9 (Oct 2007): p.17(2).