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A Social Media Glossary
- Blog:
- A truncation of the term "weblog." Blogs are frequently updated, interactive websites that post content in chronological order with the most recent content at the top. Individual articles are called "posts." Readers can interact with blog authors, called "bloggers," by leaving comments in response to individual posts. The open-source WordPress content management system is a popular blogging platform.
- Facebook (www.facebook.com):
- Web-based service that allows users to create online profiles including links, photos, notes and blog posts, and status updates. Users connect to one another by becoming "friends" and can comment on their friends' pages. Facebook pages allow businesses and brands to gather "fans," and Facebook groups bring people with related interests together in an online forum. Originally geared toward college students, Facebook is now used by kids and adults alike, and offers messaging and a wide variety of games and applications.
- Flickr (www.flickr.com):
- Online photo management and sharing application with free and premium memberships. Users can make their photos private or public, and visitors can browse, tag, and comment on public photos. Photos marked with a Creative Commons license (www.creativecommons.org) can be reused, reproduced, and altered by third parties according to the license terms, making it a great photo source for print and online publications.
- LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com):
- Online platform for staying in touch with business contacts, called "connections." Users create a profile page summarizing their professional background, like an online resume, and can interact with other users in groups through private messaging and via a topical Q&A forum. Connections can give and request professional recommendations and tap into their connections' contacts for introductions and information.
- Social Bookmarking:
- The practice of saving links to content online and identifying it with user-generated keywords, called "tags." Part of the fun of social bookmarking, and what makes it social, is sharing links rather than simply keeping them private as you might if you were just bookmarking something in your own Web browser. Popular social bookmarking sites include:
On many sites, users can assign a value to submitted material by voting it up or down, or leaving comments about the content.
- Social Networking:
- Making, maintaining, and interacting with personal and professional connections through online communities. Such communities include Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace (www.myspace.com; similar to Facebook but generally regarded as much more casual), Plaxo (www.plaxo.com), and Twitter, though there are numerous others.
- TinyURL (www.tinyurl.com):
- A free service to turn long URLs (Web addresses) into 25-character addresses that are easy to type into your browser and won't break in an e-mail like the long strings of random letters, numbers, and symbols that appear in so many webpage addresses. Other free URL shorteners include bit.ly (www.bit.ly), budURL (www.budurl.com), and snipURL (www.snipurl.com).
- Twitter (www.twitter.com):
- Social media application providing real-time, 140-character updates in response to the question "What are you doing?" Users read others' updates by "following" them and seek to grow their "followers" to have a larger audience reach. Users can post text or URLs, reply directly to other users, or exchange private messages. Third-party applications allow users to share photos and other media. A Twitter update is a "tweet." When using Twitter, one is "tweeting" or "Twittering."
- Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org):
- Free, collaborative encyclopedia written and edited by users through "wiki" technology (wiki means "quick" in Hawaiian). Wikipedia boasts nearly 700 million annual users and 10 million articles in 260 languages, according to the Wikipedia About page.
- YouTube (www.youtube.com):
- Leading online video provider. Users can watch and upload their own videos and leave comments on others’ content. Organizations can create their own YouTube channels to post relevant video content. Other online video providers include Viddler (www.viddler.com), Vimeo (www.vimeo.com), and 12seconds (www.12seconds.tv).
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