Category: social networking

Big media’s crush on social networking

The New York Times examines the burgeoning “big media” courtship with social networking sites.

Social networking is a close cousin of the other obsession of the moment: user-generated content. Of course, there is a difference. User-generated content is basically anything someone puts on the Web that is not created for overtly commercial purposes; it is often in response to something professionally created, or is derivative of it. So, it could be a blog, a message board, a homemade video on YouTube, or a customer’s book review on Amazon.com.

Social networking, on the other hand, is something potentially deeper — it represents a way to live one’s life online. In many ways, it is the two-dimensional version of what sites like Second Life aspire to be in 3-D: the digital you. And that ties to another earnestly overused term of art at the moment: engagement.

Via Micro Persuasion.

Bookmarking with Blackboard

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus reports — a full nine days after Karine Joly first posted about it — that Blackboard is entering the social bookmarking game with a tool that lets faculty members share websites a la del.icio.us and Digg. But at least one eLearning blogger is not impressed with the idea.