In the last couple of years the terms ‘web 2.0′ and ’social media’ have been bandied about more and more. So what is social media?

First, let’s take a step back to the days before social media or web 2.0 when websites served up webpages and you as a reader arrived at them to view. That’s pretty much all you did. Then websites started to become places where you could leave comments, eg weblogs (blogs), Flickr, YouTube and Facebook to name just four. Now you could participate in the content that people were putting up and it became so much easier to add your own content and discuss it with others.  Hence, the term social media.

Ben Parr’s definition is:

Social Media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings in more efficient ways.

There’s so many social media websites these days that it can be quite overwhelming. Here’s a diagram of a conversation prism from Brian Solis (click to view larger image):

Social media sites

There’s no way that you could participate in all of these, and you probably wouldn’t want to either, but if you want to get your feet wet with social media, why don’t you join some of them and have a look around?

If you want to keep it work related, then visit UniSA’s presence on social networks, have a look around, leave comments if you want (you may have to register to do so).

What do you think? Leave a comment (link at top of this post) and let us know.