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Understanding Social Media
Social media (sometimes referred to as consumer-generated media (CGM)) is the fastest growing body of information on the web. As of March 2007, there were an estimated 70 million blogs currently in existence (source: Technorati); a number that is forecast to double every 6-9 months during an explosive growth phase of interactive web content that is likely to last until the end of the decade.
In addition, tens of thousands of consumer forums and bulletin boards now post a constant stream of thoughts and experiences from consumers, providing an increasingly important source of opinion for prospective customers.
Social media is demonstrating an increasing influence on businesses as opinions on companies, products and services find news forums of expression and as breaking news finds an early voice via blogs, forums and consumer sites.
In a world where the long tail of social media is increasingly dominant, the ability to filter out noise and tune into its vital signals is fast becoming a basic requirement for anyone with an interest in corporate activity, brand awareness and customer behavior.
The ability to filter for relevant content will become increasingly important as the consumer debate moves further away from the traditional axes of media influence towards the forums and nodes of social media – a process facilitated by technology, but also driven by the growing distrust and scepticism of consumers towards traditional forms of advertising.
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Blogs & Blogging
Blogging typically refers to the combination of a practice and the technologies that support it. The practice is that of individuals, often in the context of some socio-cultural role (employee, consumer, peer-group member, activist, commentator, etc.) regularly updating a Website with content that they write.
The technologies that support blogging are primarily web-based software that supports the easy creation of content in the form of postings, and RSS, a simple mechanism for (amongst other things) making the content of blog postings readily available.
Many companies and organisations make blogging software and services available, commercial and Open Source, and targeted at both and individuals and organisations.
References
- A prescient note on blogging by Wired in 2002
- Blogging defined by Wikipedia
- Meet the 'Bloggerati', courtesy of the UK's Independent Online edition
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RSS
RSS stood originally for Rich Site Summary. It was a simple text-based file-format for summarising the content of Websites (crudely, a series of 'articles', each with a title and body text). This made it easy for Net-aware tools apart from Web Browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Firefox) to aggregate and display content from different sources, without having to do the difficult things that browsers do, such as rendering visually complicated page layouts, instead focusing on the textual information content of sites (which one might argue is exactly what most users are really interested in).
The RSS standard has evolved (though it still does largely the same thing as before), and is now taken to stand for Really Simple Syndication because of the way in which the simple structured file format makes it easy to display a site's content in other places.
RSS is exploding in popularity largely, one might argue, because of the convenience it offers to users. By using an RSS reader (see references, below), you get the content you are interested in delivered to you in one place and in a timely fashion, without having to visit many different Websites and wade through frequently obstructive navigation and information architecture, pop-up adverts, and so on. As a user, RSS feels empowering, because content comes to you.
RSS is the primary protocol via which iFeed discovers web content. Given its popularity and ease of use, RSS has become the principal method by which the blogging community has made its content available to others. However, with an ever-growing number of sites communicating via RSS, separating noise from signal has become a key challenge for those seeking access to social media content. iFeed has been specifically designed with this in mind. Not only is content effectively filtered twice before it reaches the user, iFeed's unique user-interface allows easy management of multiple queries over a variety of topics that are searched continuously, courtesy of iFeed's persistent search capabilities.
References
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Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is a collective noun and over-used buzz-word that refers to a set of inter-related trends and technologies around the Internet and its use that is in the process of changing the online landscape for both consumers and providers of Net-based content and services, not lease because of the blurring of the boundary between 'consumer' and 'producer'. Some key themes are as follows.
Decentralisation
Tools and technologies are increasingly empowering users who were once locked into being merely consumers of online content and services to become providers and distributors of content, shifting power away from traditional centralised controllers such as record companies, news agencies and movie studios. Tools for blogging and Podcasting make it easy for users to produce textual and audio content for distribution over the Internet. Similar tools are emerging for audio-visual content [see the Participatory Culture Foundation for example].
In terms of distribution, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies such as BitTorrent provide a means of distributing content without the need for high-specification centralised servers; instead, this system turns every downloader into an uploader, spreading the strain in an efficient and scalable way. The drive for increasingly bandwidth-costly content is in turn driving the adoption of P2P technologies, which are moving from niche applications towards main-stream infrastructural status.
Enhanced user experience
Recent developments in browser technology mean that instead of the traditionally 'clunky' browser experience, having to fill in boxes and click buttons and only seeing information updated when pages are loaded or re-loaded, sites are now able to provide simple yet dynamic interfaces that update themselves in real-time, much like traditional desktop applications, without having to resort to problematic proprietary technologies such as Flash. A good example of this, from one of the leaders in this area, is Google Maps.
Service-oriented systems
Traditionally, companies only made their data and services available through their Websites (complicated custom integration projects not-withstanding). However, in a manner similar to how RSS makes textual content available in an open and accessible fashion (driving users to become regular consumers of it), there is an increasing trend to make software functionality and data available in an open fashion to 3rd party software. A good example of this is the Amazon API. By signing up for a free account, developers can tap into the functionality and data that powers Amazon.com. This enables the developer to provide sophisticated services very easily (for example for customised book searching and listing), and benefits Amazon by creating new services for users that eventually drive consumers to Amazon.com itself, but at a fraction of the cost of developing such services itself.
References
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Wiki
Wiki Webs, or Wikis are sites that allow easy collaborative editing of their content and structure by users. In this respect they can be thought of as unstructured Content Management Systems, where the users are able to arbitrarily define both content and structure (in terms of relationships between pages). The potential of Wikis as simple yet powerful tools for internal knowledge management and collaboration is gradually being realised, and they are thus starting to migrate into the corporate environment. This is reflected in the trend for commercial Wiki products, both hosted and as stand-alone software packages, where once they were more commonly found as Open Source packages or used to facilitate Open Source development processes.
Famous examples of publicly-accessible and publicly-editable Wikis include Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia built entirely from public contributions and running on Open Source Software, and by the same organisation and in the same spirit, Wiki News.
References