Now
let’s take a look at each of the main types of social media, and how they work.
These explanations are intentionally very general, because with social media
every
rule
seems to have an exception.
In
fact, among the defining characteristics of social media are the blurring of
definitions, rapid innovation, reinvention and mash-ups. Each explanation also
has a section on how to try out that form of social media yourself, with
pointers on both how to find social media that’s relevant to you and how you
might go about creating it. If you want to really understand how social media
works, there’s no better way than to take part in it.
the
combination of two or more pieces of content (or software, or websites) is one
of the phenomena in social media that make it at once so exciting, fast-moving
and sometimes bewildering. Mash-ups are possible because of the openness of
social media – many websites and software developers encourage people to play
with their services and reinvent them.
There
are literally hundreds of mash-ups of the Google Earth service, where people
have attached information to parts of the maps. For instance there is a UK rail
service mash-up where you can track in real time where trains are on the map.
Fans of the TV series 24 have mapped locations from the shows’ plotlines on to
a Google Earth map.
A
popular type of mash-up cannibalises different pieces of content, typically
videos and music. Popular videos on YouTube can spawn hundreds of imitations,
homages and
(frequently)
comic reinterpretations. In communities like this, the number of mash-ups a
piece of content spawns is often an indicator of its popularity.
