This is a version of the workshop I presented at the MELTA Literacies Day programme held at WOU in Kuala Lumpur.
So what is social media? Social Media refers to Internet-based and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. There are numerous Internet tools for almost countless social purposes.
So are you in the Digital Age or a dinosaur in the 21st century? Below is a series of “Self-Check” questions. See how you fare!
l Do you use the Internet? List the uses.
l Do you use email for correspondence? If yes, how frequent and how many hours per day is spent on email correspondence?
l Do you chat online? If yes, how often.
l Do you blog? If yes, how often?
l Do you participate in an online forum? If yes, how often.
l Are you on Facebook? Why are you there? How often do you connect with others?
l Do you twitter? How often? What do you twitter?
l Do you have an e-portfolio or website or homepage?
l Have you posted anything on YouTube?
l List any other ways you use the Internet.
You answers will indicate your position in a social media literacy continuum– from illiterate to functionally literate to fully literate. So where do you stand?
Have you heard of any of the following applications? Which do you use? If you have not used it, try to guess what kind of social media the application could be.
Below is the list:
1. Askville 2. Bebo 3. Customer Lobby 4. Delicious
5. Digg 6. Epinions 7. Facebook 8. Flickr
9. Google Reader 10. Hi5 11. I (name one!!) 12. Justin tv
13. Kongregate 14. LinkedIn 15. MySpace 16. NutshellMail
17. Orkut 18. Plurk 19. Ozone 20. reddit
21. Second Life 22. Upcoming 23. Vimeo 24. Wetpaint
25. Xanga 26. Yelp 27. YouTube
28. Yahoo Messenger. 29. Zoomr
Below is an A-Z of social media I put together - thanks to wikipedia!
A-Z of Social Media
(Source: http://www.wikipedia.org)
Askville
Askville is a user-driven research site. Askville is designed to run much like a
computer game. Users gain or lose “experience points” in particular topics as
they answer questions in those topics, depending on how good their answer is.
Users also receive “quest gold” by asking and answering questions, and by voting
on the worth of other people’s answers. In the past, these coins could be
redeemed for items in an Askville store. The store is out of stock at present and
there is no indication when, or if, it will open again.
Also unlike other question-answer sites, Askville has evolved into a social community as well as an information site. This is primarily due to their discussion boards, where Askvillians can enter into long discussions sparked by individual questions. Though indeed sparked by the questions, discussions often take on a personality of their own. No “experience points” or “quest gold” are awarded for discussions, but many Askvillians have come to value the give-and-take, the bickering, and especially the supportive friendships made there.
Bebo, an acronym for “Blog early, blog often”, is a social networking website, founded in January 2005. It can be used in many countries including Ireland, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.
Customer Lobby
Customer Lobby is a web-based reviews company for service-based businesses. The company was founded in the effort to create a comprehensive reviews solution for services businesses in the burgeoning Web 2.0 environment. Customer Lobby provides a service and corresponding web software to clients to get, manage and publish customer reviews. Its system allows clients to proactively invite end-customers for reviews, verify their authenticity before publishing, and correspond with consumers to manage negative reviews.
Delicious
Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. It has more than five million users and 150 million bookmarked URLs.
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organise, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
Digg
Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site’s cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page. Digg’s popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems.
Epinions
Epinions.com is a general consumer review site that was established in 1999. Epinions was acquired by Shopping.com (known as DealTime.com at the time of the acquisition) in 2003, which in turn was acquired by Ebay in 2005. At Epinions, visitors can read reviews about a variety of items to help them decide on a purchase or they can join for free and begin writing reviews that may earn them money and recognition, according to the site’s FAQs.
Facebook
Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc
Flickr
Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular website for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. As of June 2009, it claims to host more than 3.6 billion images, up from 3 billion in November 2008.
Google Reader
Google Reader is a Web-based aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. In general internet terms, a news aggregation website is a website where headlines are collected, usually manually, by the website owner.
Hi5
Hi5 is a social networking website. Hi5 claims to have over 60 million active members. In Hi5, users create an online profile in order to show information such as interests, age and hometown and upload user pictures where users can post comments. Hi5 also allows the user to create personal photo albums and set up a music player in the profile. Users can also send friend requests via e-mail to other users. When a person receives a friend request, he may accept or decline it, or block the user altogether. If the user accepts another user as a friend, the two will be connected directly or in the 1st degree. The user will then appear on the person’s friend list and vice-versa.
I
I can’t seem to find a website!
Justin.tv
Justin.tv is a website that allows users to produce and watch live streaming video. Like YouTube, Justin.tv user accounts are called “channels”, and users are encouraged to broadcast a wide variety of user-generated live video content, called “broadcasts”.
Justin.tv is notable for its origin: The original Justin.tv was a single channel featuring founder Justin Kan, who broadcast his life 24/7 and popularised the term lifecasting. In 2007, Justin Kan stopped broadcasting and Justin.tv relaunched into its current form as a network of thousands of various channels.
Users are permitted to broadcast to an unlimited number of people for free, and watching broadcasts do not require user registration. Broadcasts that are considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users over the age of 18. Broadcasts containing defamation, pornography, copyright violations, and material encouraging criminal conduct are prohibited by Justin.tv’s terms of service.
Kongregate
Kongregate is a social web games website, described by its founders as “the YouTube of videogames”. The site allows visitors to play games created and submitted by members, in much the same way that YouTube showcases video content created and submitted by its members.
LinkedIn
The purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.
The “gated-access approach” (where contact with any professional requires either a preexisting relationship, or the intervention of a contact of theirs) is intended to build trust among the service’s users.
MySpace
MySpace is a social networking website with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music…
NutshellMail
NutshellMail is a web-based service that enables you to access, manage, and monitor messages from all your email and social networking accounts through your most commonly used inbox. NutshellMail transforms your primary email account into a universal inbox so you can retrieve messages and manage all your accounts in one place while still keeping them separate and organised. NutshellMail also provides a secure and compliant way to access messages in the workplace for employees who are restricted from external webmail sites.
Orkut
Orkut is a free-access social networking service owned and operated by Google. The service is designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Although Orkut is less popular in the United States than competitors Facebook and MySpace, it is one of the most visited websites in India and Brazil.
Plurk
Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as plurks) through short messages or links, which can be up to 140 text characters in length.
Updates are then shown on the user’s home page using a timeline which lists all the updates received in chronological order, and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Users can respond to other users’ updates from their timeline through the Plurk.com website, by instant messaging, or by text messaging.
Qzone
Qzone is a social web site, which was created by Tencent in 2005. It permits the user to write a Blog, keep a diary, send photos, and listen to music. Users can set the background of Qzone and accessories based on their preferences so that every Qzone is customised to the user’s taste. However, most services of Qzone are not free; only after buying the “Canary Diamond” can users access every service without paying extra.
According to a report published by Tencent, Qzone had more than 200 million uses as of January 31, 2009, surpassing other social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace.
Reddit
Reddit is a social news website on which users can post links to content on the Internet. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to become more or less prominent on the reddit home page. The site has discussion areas in which users may discuss the posted links and vote for or against others’ comments. When there are enough votes against a given comment, it will not be displayed by default, although a reader can display it through a link or preference. Users who submit articles which other users like and subsequently “vote up” receive “karma” points as a reward for submitting articles those other users consider interesting.
Second Life
Second Life (SL) is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab that launched on June 23, 2003 and is accessible via the Internet. A free client program called the Second Life Viewer[1] enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialise, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world, which residents refer to as the grid. Second Life is for people aged 18 and over, while Teen Second Life is for people aged 13 to 17.
Twitter
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets.
Upcoming
Upcoming (formerly Upcoming.org) is a social event calendar website. Upcoming combines features of an event calendar and a social networking site. Primarily, the site is a searchable, browsable repository of upcoming events, such as music concerts, art exhibits, business conferences, and so on. Event information can be contributed by the user community, although an increasing percentage of event data now comes from commercial sources.
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-centric social network site. The site supports embedding, sharing, video storage, and allows user-commenting on each video page. Users must register to upload content. Registered users may also create a profile and upload small user pictures as their avatars, comment and “like” videos.
Wetpaint
Wetpaint is a company that provides social network service and wiki hosting service (or wiki farm). Wetpaint targets non-technical internet users who want to collaborate online, and therefore attempts to include easy to use features, such as a three step wiki creation wizard.
Xanga
Xanga is a website that hosts weblogs, photoblogs, and social networking profiles.
Yelp
Yelp, Inc. is a Web 2.0 company that operates a social networking, user review, and local search web site of the same name. Over 25 million people access Yelp’s website each month, putting it in the top 100 of U.S. Internet web sites.
YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos.
Yahoo! Messengerer
Yahoo! Messenger is a communication tool, and anyone, anywhere in the world, with a computer and Internet connection can use it.
Zoomr
Zooomr is a website for sharing digital photos. Zooomr has no limits on uploading, storing, and archiving photos.
Found any website site you want to visit and participate in? Someone have gone overboard and spend hours at the computer. This might be a little hazardous! Health warning for all of us in the digital age!
It is good to have e-literacy and be connected to our friends and colleagues in cyberspace but too much of anything could be harmful.
Irish poet John O’Donohue, devoted a section of his book Beauty: The Invisible Embracece
O’Donohue explains, ” . . . the digital virus has truncated time and spacece.”
The self has become anxious for what the next moment might bring. This greed for destination obliterates the journey. The digital desire for the single instant schools the mind in false priority. (Page 27)
He laments the impact of things digital on the quality of life:
When you accumulate experiences at such a tempo, everything becomes thin. Consequently, you become ever more absent from your life and this fosters emptiness that haunts the heart.
Such dire warnings stand in stark contrast to the claims of various purveyors of the Digital Age. According to them, life is grander, more fun and vastly more entertaining when it flashes by with the velocity of a TV ad.
It is a matter of choice and judgment. Each individual must learn how and when to go unplugged. Digital offers richness and value when chosen thoughtfully.
Source: What Digital Age? By Jamie McKenzie
http://fromnowon.org/may08/digital.html
So if you have not got on the social media bandwagon choose wisely and get connected only with those you want and need to.
Good luck in cyberspace … don’t scream …..