Social media

The online technologies, spaces and practices people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media.

Social media is the term that describes websites and online publishing techniques that give viewers the opportunity to participate in the creation and editing of content. They suddenly rose to prominence in 2004, and by 2007 sites such as Wikipedia (the wide ranging online encyclopedia), Facebook (personal profiles and social networking), YouTube (video content sharing and social networking) and Flickr (photo sharing) had become household names.

Social media can harness any file format, including text, images, audio, and video, and be displayed within any publishing environment such as message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, social networks, wikis, blogs etc.

See also: Blog, Blogosphere, Web 2.0, Online social network