Social Networks - Blogs and tagging

The fastest growing trend on the Internet is towards sites which encourage interaction and collaboration, called social networks. It features a greater degree of participation and user contribution than earlier Internet models.

It moves beyond email to Chat, Internet Messaging, publication of public profiles of personal interests, ‘tagging’ or cataloguing content, commenting and responding to other’s contributions, and especially Blogging.

“A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting)”
wikipedia.com





Blogging software, often run online, is easy to use, such as at Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, or LiveJournal.

The active users of the Internet are no longer content to be merely the receivers of information. They want to participate and be a part of what is happening. It is a much more dynamic, and socially active process than it used to be. It has the potential to radically change traditional media, and corporate and political life as well.

Emerging and successful web sites are incorporating these collaborative and interactive elements, using the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to help identify the most popular content.

A good example of collaboration is Wikipedia, the user-generated online encyclopaedia. “A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages.

This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring.” Wikipedia.org

Amazon.com, for example, features user-reviews, and identifies similar items people have bought at the site. It highlights popular items and allows voting of particular items. It encourages users to create lists, for the benefit of other users (Listmania).

It even has a product Wiki to “tag products with what they are and with their most important facts, and for others to search, discover, filter, and compare products by those tags”.