September 22, 2008

Social media: It's okay to play

Because the social media landscape is growing exponentially, it's critical to stay on top of the trends—and there's no substitution for experiencing them for yourself. Here are five things you should know about—and easy-to-use resources for testing them out.

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1. Social bookmarking is a method for managing your online bookmarks on the Internet—instead of the traditional way, through your web browser. These bookmarks can be easily accessed from any computer and shared with others (or kept private, depending on your personal settings). You can also search for what others with similar interests like.	delicious.com
2. Microblogging is essentially a scaled-down form of blogging. Using (typically) a cell phone or IM, users can publish short thoughts and ideas (generally up to 140 characters) to their personal blog.	twitter.com
3. Lifestreaming is an online record of a person's daily activities, aggregated from their online content such as blog posts, social network updates and online photos.	friendfeed.com
4. A mashup is a web application that combines data from multiple data sources to create a new service.	pandora.com
5. A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-assigned tags or simply the word content of a site, used (typically) to describe the content of the site. Tags are usually single words, listed alphabetically. The importance of a tag is shown with font size or color.	wordle.net