Lately i’ve been noticing every where that people seem to be equating social media with social networking and more over they seem to be treating Blogging as something other then social media. It seems that social networking is considered by most Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Well, it is much more than that.

Social media are the various forms of user generated content and the collection of websites and applications that enables people to interact and share information online.

Examples of Social Media:

• online forums (e.g., DigitalPoint)
• blogs (e.g., WordPress)
• social networking sites (e.g., Facebook)
• social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg)
• video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube)
• photo sharing sites (e.g. Flickr)
• streaming sites (e.g., Ustream)
• user reviews (e.g., Amazon)
• crowdsourcing (e.g., Wikipedia)
• content aggregators (e.g., FriendFeed)

As you see from the list above social media is much larger and covers an area that most people didn’t realize.
You might also be surprised to know that Social Media may even have been around since the early 80′s when the first Usenet was developed as a form of a distributed discussion forum.

So what is social media in my opinion?

It’s an overrated development in the past 2 years to get people talking to one another. Social Media is nothing without participation and while people do tend to get the two mixed up i do agree that they are basically one in the same. It’s really nothing special, it’s been around for decades!

My goal is to become an expert is Search Engine Optimization !