View source for Social media

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Social media are inexpensive (for the user) and accessible internet tools and websites that enable anyone to publish and access online information. The content of social media is created by the people using it, a phenomenon known as [[user-generated content]].

Social media are a key element in [[Web 2.0]], which refers to a second generation of web technologies, characterized as facilitating communication, collaboration and information sharing.

Social media are distinct from traditional industrial media, such as newspapers, television, and film, which generally require significant resources to publish information. Such traditional media, often referred to as Main-Stream Media (MSM), have been losing part of their audience to social media, and are therefore increasing their own use of social media in order to stay afloat.

==Micro-history of social media==
The roots of Social Media were in the early Bulletin Boards of the 1980s, which gave rise to the first [[Virtual community|virtual communities]]. In the 1990s the invention of the [[World Wide Web]] quickly led to the development of personal online publishing with the first [[blog]]s, and of online collaboration with the first [[wiki]]s. In the late 1990s Geocities allowed users to post web pages, while Classmates.com and SixDegrees allowed users to list and communicate with friends and contacts. The early 2000s saw services which gave users more control over content and connectivity, such as Friendster, MySpace and Bebo. Currently popular services include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

==Classification of main types of social media==
Communication:
*[[Blog]]s
*[[Microblogging]]
*Event sites

Social networking:
*[[Social network service]]s
*Social aggregators

Online collaboration:
*[[Wiki]]s

Opinion and knowledge sharing:
*Social bookmarking
*Social news
*Opinion sites
*Product reviews
*Q&A Sites

Media sharing:
*Photo sharing
*Music sharing
*Video sharing
*Game sharing
*Podcasting
*Livecasting

Entertainment:
*[[Virtual world]]s
*[[Online game]]s: browser games, massively multiplayer online games

==See Also==
*[[Web 2.0]]
*Mashup
*Folksonomy

==External Links==
*Wikipedia article about Social Media: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
*Common Craft animation about Social Media: http://www.commoncraft.com/socialmedia
*boyd and Ellison on History of Social Network Sites: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
*Trebor Scholz's "A History of the Social Web": http://www.downes.ca/files/scholz.html
*Prokoy Neva deconstructs Sholz's article: http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/10/a-biased-histor.html
*Another history by socialmediarockstar: http://socialmediarockstar.com/history-of-social-media

[[Category:Social media]]