When we talk about social media we talk about the combination of tools: blogs, wiki’s, forums, RSS feeds, folksonomies, tagging, twitter – basically tools that make it easy for people to generate and share and discover content and see patterns and themes in that content.
A lot of reasons it emerged was that people were becoming aware that basically you can’t manage the web – trying to structure the vast amounts of diverse content – which I’ve singularly failed to do over the years.
Many of us would argue that attempts to structure information in organisations have similarly failed. People have spent lots of money on knowledge management systems and knowledge repositories; spent a lot of time taxonimising, structuring and the like. But in many ways one mans sensible taxonomy is anothers bewildering jargon. And just the speed of diversity and the content development is just too fast. So being able to say that this is a piece of interesting information, being able to point to it using an URL and being able to comment on why it’s interesting is a lot of what social media tools are about.
Or am I rambling because people are frustrated with the conventional way of doing things so they’re beginning to spill out onto the web?
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Probably a bit of both ( rambling and frustrated!)
Still the point you make here is valid, its not often in the past that people were allowed to air their views so freely and in so many diverse ways.
Long live the internet!