racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

Here’s an article I wrote for the UP Law-ISP’s iBlog special publication this year. It is largely based on other Social Media-related web content and blog posts I have written through the years.

iBlog 3, the 3rd Philippine Blogging Summit, will be held on the 13th and 14th of April at the UP School of Economics, in Diliman. I will be speaking in the Blogging and Journalism panel.

Social Media: Changing the Way We Publish, Consume and Share Information

Social Media is one of the most profound products of the 21st century. It has changed the face of publishing, marketing, public relations, and yes, even media itself. Social Media is about the empowerment of you, the user. It is a paradigm shift in how the World Wide Web is structured, and how we publish, consume and share information today and in the years to come.

Blogs are but a part of the big picture. Social Media, after all, encompasses a variety of mediums, which includes just about anything that concerns being social and being able to communicate. You also have podcasts, wikis, social bookmarkers, social networks, social news sites, and even online games.

However wide the coverage of social media, it boils down to five basic concepts: participation, openness, conversation, community and connectedness.

User Empowerment and Participation

Social Media shifts the power to produce content and develop ideas away from the established mainstream, and towards the individual. In the past, information available online on the World Wide Web was static, and this was controlled by the few who had access to equipment, bandwidth and content. Content was highly filtered, being controlled by the newspapers, magazines, companies with big marketing budgets, and a few really smart people who could write copy and code HTML very well. Even when blogs started to surface, these were relegated to being personal diaries and nothing more.

Today, however, blogs have grown to be popular sources of online commentary, opinion, and even journalistic reportage. Blogs are crossing over to the mainstream. Moreover, other more media-rich content have started to become popular. Video sharing sites have become popular channels for grassroots moviemaking. Podcasts–audio programs distributed over the Internet–are becoming good alternatives to talk radio.

Collaboration, Sharing and Community

Social Media has also made it very easy for people from around the world to collaborate to achieve certain goals:

Documents can now be edited online by dozens or even hundreds of people collaborating to to ensure accuracy of information or correct language. Wikipedia, the most popular online encyclopedia today–and to date the number one site Google drives traffic to–relies on users to pitch in with adding and editing content for accuracy. This means anyone can edit content. If anyone enters in incorrect or unverifiable information, the rest of the world can then fix these as they see fit.

Bookmarks can now be stored and shared online for friends to see. What’s even better is that social bookmarkers like del.icio.us, Reddit and StumbleUpon let you make passive recommendations to your friends based on what you bookmark online.

You can now submit news items to social news sites and these will then voted upon by other users to determine the news headlines for the day. Social news sites like DIGG and the new Netscape are popular among the tech community for their user-contributed content and user-determined headlines.

The possibilities are quite endless. And this is not only being done in the grassroots. In fact, many social media outfits have been involved in big-ticket purchases ranging from a few thousands, to the low millions to the billions of dollars. For instance, Google recently purchased video-sharing site YouTube for $ 1.65 billion–no piddling amount for a social media application. There are several other major purchases, like Yahoo!’s acquisition of Flickr and even del.icio.us, and these indicate that social media is going mainstream.

Social Media has enabled the Internet user to shift from being a consumer to being a prosumer–one who produces and at the same time consumes information. Social Media has also empowered you, the user, to choose what information to consume, and also to give other people profound recommendations to that effect.

Organization

Another important change that social media has brought about is how information is organized online. While previously the Web was categorized according to pre-set taxonomies, such as with web directories, social media makes use of folksonomies–which is based on the root word “folks” or people. Taxonomy classifies information by hierarchical categorization. Folksonomy, meanwhile, organizes information by tags and keywords. These are not dictated by centralized authorities, but instead defined and attached by you, the user, according to your preferences.

As a result, there is no longer one single classification for each item of information. Instead, we are able to decide how information is organized, and hence attach the tags that we see fit. So instead of categorizing a news item as “cars” or “racing”, for instance, I can tag it as “formula 1″, “F1″, “Ferrari”, “Michael Schumacher”, and whatever other keyword I see fit. Then when I retrieves the information, I know just what to search for, because I was the one who tagged using the keywords that are relevant to me.

The New Social Order

Social Media, therefore has changed who decides and how these decisions are brought about. Before, editors and publishers decided the news headlines. Before, editors and publishers decide which story goes to which section of the newspaper. Today, it’s you, the user, who has control.

Benefits

The most obvious advantage of social media is that users are now empowered to determine what the Web contains and how these are presented and shared. The Internet inherits the social aspect of humanity. However, this is only one of many benefits.

Relationships in social media are mostly person-to-person and machine-to-machine. People connect to each other through social networks and messaging. Computers, meanwhile, now better understand the relationships among online content through better semantics, which include XML, RSS and microformats. This means blogs can automatically communicate with one another through trackbacks and pingbacks. Podcasts can automatically be downloaded by iTunes everytime there is a new episode. Your RSS reader can automatically alert you if your favorite blogs have new entries.

Another important benefit of social media can be related to search engine technology. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! can only use search bots to index websites and complex algorithms to rank website relevance. With social media, meanwhile, humans who understand the content and context of information classify and organize the content, and share these to the public via social bookmarks. Relevance and ranking are rendered immaterial, because now it’s the power of recommendation that takes the place of search results. If a friend thinks a certian website, blog or web application is good, then I will most likely visit it, too.

Disadvantages

The main drawback of social media also stems from the fact that it’s social. Like with any population or group within a population, social media can easily by gamed or manipulated by dominant factions. Social news sites and social bookmarkers rely on the quantity of users who “vote” to determine importance and relevance. There are ways to cheat this system, and this is mostly done through social engineering.

For instance, in social news sites, cheaters can buy votes or inflate votes through dummy users. Once the tipping point is reached, legitimate users will then have the tendency to agree with the seemingly dominant majority and blindly give their positive votes. It then becomes a question of whether information online is relevant because a lot of people vote for it, or whether people vote for it because it already seems relevant to the majority.

Cheaters can also manipulate collaborative content to reflect their own biases and their own versions of the truth.

There are checks and balances. Headlines on social news sites can be “buried” because of inappropriate content. Entries on wiki encyclopedias can be reverted to more accurate versions. Still, some are able to get away with cheating, as with the real world.

Folksonomies, meanwhile, also have inherent disadvantages. Because the organization of information is no longer centralized, tags and keywords are prone to variations and even errors. One person can tag an item differently from another person. And even the same person might tag similar items with different sets of keywords or variations thereof. Tagging systems are also prone to misspellings. Items tagged as “carrs”, for instance, might not be appropriately bundled in with “cars”, which seems to be the correct spelling.

The Future of Social Media

Notwithstanding the drawbacks associated with social media, blogging, podcasting, social networking, online gaming, and other such forms of new media are here to stay. Social Media is still in its infancy, and concepts are likely to evolve through time. We netizens, meanwhile, are increasingly discovering, using and creating social online tools.

Humans are social by nature. While the World Wide Web is a system of machines connected through a large network, the rise of social media tells us that human judgement still holds supremacy over computer logic and algorithms–which are actually creations of the human mind. As content proves to be the driving factor of today’s Web, social media is proving to be the next killer application of the Internet.

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