Last updated: 10 March 2010
MAKING SENSE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
 What is "social media"?

Social technologies, aka social media, are a new breed of technologies that have developed over the last few years, that have changed the face of the Web and are having a big impact on all aspects of life - working, learning and playing

So how do these technologies differ from early web technologies. The following table highlights the main difference between early web technologies (aka Web 1.0) and social technologies (aka Web 2.0

EARLY WEB Web 1.0 Web technologies	SOCIAL WEB Web 2.0 Social technologies
read-only web	read-write web
content publishing	user-generated content
	social software

Web 1.0

• is defined as the "read-only web", that is content produced by an expert author and published on the web to be read by consumers.

Web 2.0

• is defined as the "read-write" web; it provides all the services and applications to allow individuals to co-create content, collaborate and share it with others.
• supports user-generated content, that is content created by "users", rather than specialist authors or publishers using a variety of affordable technologies like blogs, podcasts and wikis.
• encourages the social aspect of the Web, e.g. through the use of social media like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking tools and social networks.

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What do these social technologies look like?

Many of the social media tools are now becoming household names: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.  But there are a number of different categories of social technologies, of which the following are the most significant: (Follow the links for more information and examples of tools)

1. Social networking - establishing and building online relationships with others, and a fundamental social activity
2. Social bookmarking - storing and sharing links to web resources
3. File-sharing - creating, storing and/or sharing files in all formats: pictures, videos, presentations, documents, screencasts, etc
4. Communicating with others - in real time via instant messaging and chat, in web meetings, and in live broadcasts, or asynchronously via email
5. Collaborating with others - synchronously or asynchronously to co-create documents, presentations, mindmaps, etc
6. Blogging - reading, commenting or writing blog posts
7. Podcasting - creating or listening to audio (MP3) files
8. RSS feeds - subscribing to and reading blog and web news feeds
9. Micro-blogging - sending, receiving and replying to short messages with others - for real-time communications
10. Aggregating content/resources - through tagging or dashbaords

Although some of the social media tools fall into just one category, a number span a number of different categories.

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Social media use is a revolution

It is clear from the statistics provided in the video below, that a huge number of people are using social media in their daily lives

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What impact are social (Web 2.0) technologies having on working and learning?

Social media us is having a big impact on all aspects of our daily life - including our work and the way we learn.

Web 1.0 Web technologies	Web 2.0 Social Technologies
publishing content/courses reading content some interaction with content	sharing information and knowledge
	collaborative working and learning social learning
CONTENT	PEOPLE

Web 1.0 was all about publishing and delivering content.  Web 2.0 is about individuals creating content in a variety of formats and sharing information and knowledge using social media tools like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and social networks support a new collaborative approach to working and learning.   If you could only use one word to describe Web 1.0 and one to describe Web 2.0 then they would be CONTENT and PEOPLE.

Reading List

• Social media