Social Media & Similar Terms

Throughout this site we use a number of terms that essentially mean the same thing: social media, social technologies, knowledge-sharing technologies, etc.

What we're trying to highlight is any software, online service or hardware that enables information to be easily shared and relationships to be enriched and expanded. However, as each term raises a number of confused eyebrows, we thought we'd give a little explanation here.

Social Media is an umbrella term used to describe the various forms of new media rapidly being adopted around the globe by businesses, organizations and individuals whose websites and services integrate new technologies, social interaction and rich media like audio, hyperlinked text, images and video.

Some examples are blogs, podcasts, social-networking sites like facebook and linkedin, wikis, and media sharing sites like Youtube. You can read more on here on Wikipedia, (a type of social knowledge-sharing technology itself) if you'd like to dive into it some more.