Quickie Tour

SM rule #1: Ya gotta use it to understand it! But where to start?

There are hundreds (thousands?) of “Social Media” sites, tools/technologies. New ones debut constantly. Fortunately, most are variations of existing tools/technologies. (i.e. MySpace is like Facebook is like Classmates is like LinkedIn is like Orkut…) Success spawns imitators and rivals. Eventually the market shakes out and only the top ones remain.

This means we can tour the staples by choosing major players in each market category. Once you understand these, you can explore others to learn what makes them unique. It could be the audience they're aimed at or that they've added some novel twist to the existing formula.

Even better, many of these tools can be fun and extremely useful in your work and life.

As a guide, I recommend downloading and printing out my Self Guided Tour of Web 2.0 and Social Media (2 pages, Adobe .pdf). It even includes handy spaces for noting login names and passwords. (Whoo Hoo!)

The Social Media Staples:

Blogging tools include WordPress, Blogger (which I've used for this blog), and TypePad, among many, many others (AMMO). See comparisons. Wikipedia entry.

News Aggregators (readers) include Google Reader, Bloglines, RSS Bandit, AMMO... See rankings. Wikipedia entry.

Image/picture sharing sites include Faces, Flickr, Picasa, AMMO... See comparisons.

Podcasting (essentially blogging via audio or video files) Digg podcasting category, podcast.com, itunes, AMMO...

Video hosting/sharing sites include YouTube, ShortBrain, Veoh, AMMO... See comparisons.

Social bookmarking sites include del.ic.ious, Technorati, and Stumbleupon, AMMO... See rankings. Wikipedia entry.

Collaborative tools include wikis and Google Documents, AMMO... Wikipedia entry.

Social networks include MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, AMMO... [ranking page] Wikipedia entry.

Social networking sites are interesting in that they incorporate many of the other tools. (MySpace, for example, incorporates picture, audio, and video sharing, and a blog, along with intra-system email, instant messaging, news posting, and web page design tools.)

However, they do so within their proprietary networks, which encourages their members to interact with each other and invite others into the network. Most of these networks cannot interact with one another. However, the market is beginning to force them to open up a bit.

Other tools to be aware of:

Google Adwords – actually makes it possible for the average business owner to set up a DIY ad campaign that appears on Google.
Craigslist – the world’s most extensive (and free) classified advertising system.
Wikipedia – the world’s biggest (and user-edited) encyclopedia.
Skype – circumvent the telephone companies and call long-distance via your computer (video calls included).
Twitter – keep all you friends updated by broadcasting text messages.
Diigo – social “annotation”; a bookmarking site combined with the ability to leave sticky notes on the sites you bookmarked (helpful in reminding you why you did so)
Second Life – a virtual world where you create a virtual you and interact with the other “inworlders”; the latest, coolest toy out there…

AMMO...

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This is post 2 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re all short) presenting my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see Nothing's New >

SMG Law #7: Evolution

This is the easy one... that makes all the others difficult.

By nature, computers and related devices are endlessly reconfigurable. Everything will constantly change… except for the human element. (See principle 1. Simplexity.) This means that everything we discuss about social media is going to change. However, the Seven Laws of of SMG should help us navigate that.

A few upcoming examples:

There's a race between a Facebook-centered group and a Google-centered group to create a more "open" version of a social media platform. (Remember, these sites tend to be islands from each other.) This includes both allowing programmers to write new tools for the sites, but also allowing the different networks to interact between each other. This means your Facebook friends might also be able to be your LinkedIn friends without having to create a page/profile on both networks. In the long run, I think we'll end up with a simplified way of making our own web pages that are open to anyone we want in our personal network. (Geek out on the details.)

Diigo.com, a "social annotation" site... takes many of the elements of social bookmarking, but adds in features, including a virtual stickie note, that you can leave on sites to remind yourself (or others in your network) why you bookmarked that particular site. Their video explains it pretty well.

Second Life... a virtual world, where you create a virtual you, and participate in any number of virtual activities... including casual conversations, rock concerts, lectures (by real professors on real subjects). There is a real economy with its own money and entrepreneurs within. Both Sun Microsystems and IBM are experimenting with participation here... Sun's even trying out virtual press conferences. Easier to point you there than to explain.

The list will go on... and I'll keep posting as it does. However, thought the technology keeps changing, people will still behave like people and humanize it. The 7 Laws of Social Media should give you a good set of bearings as to what we'll do.

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This is post 16 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re all short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see So, What do We Actually DO With This?

SMG Law #6: Measurement

Everything online or on device is measurable.

Measurement shows us the bottom line. It is how we keep score to see if what we’re doing really matters. How does this affect us if we change our behavior? The machine can tell us. Show our effect. It’s how we make money. Effect change. It’s how we get our “systems” to tell us that they care.

Rather than blah, blah at you, I’m going to send you on a tour of Google Analytics… one of the most accessible measurement tools out there. (AND it’s FREE.) It gives the essence of what you should be doing when it comes to measurement. (It’s also surprisingly easy to install… and learning the reports teaches a whole lot about questions you should be asking about your business… or site… anyway.)

Beyond that, the methodology is simple:

1. Start out with a clear picture of what you want to accomplish.
2. Put numbers to it. If you don’t know what the numbers should be, then make a WAG (Wild Ass Guess) to establish a baseline. You’ll soon be able to see patterns.
3. On reviewing the numbers, make an adjustment to your clear picture. What can you change to have an effect? (And you can do this on just parts. Don't obsess on the whole thing. And the changes can be in the real world... can a change in our print ads affect our online performance?)
4. Repeat.
   

Now, Analytics is specifically designed for web sites and blogs (which are essentially personal web sites). But every type of social media has some form of measurement… just for simple starters:

• Even the simplest of email campaign management systems should show you how many emails were opened.
• Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn let you track the number of friends/associates you have. Heck, LinkedIn lets you track all of your contacts contacts… to see how big your network can get. (Which means that when you announce something, it goes to a larger audience...)
  
• Social bookmarking sites specifically advocate the ranking (voting) of articles. Just read under the headlines to see who voted on what. Watching these rankings over time can help you determine what that community will find worth of their attention.
• Video sites have built-in counters that tell you how many views there have been of each video.

Bottom line: Learn how. Ask your consultants. You no longer have an excuse for not measuring.

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This is post 15 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re all short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see SMG Law 7/ Evolution >

SMG Law #5: Freedom

"Information wants to be free." (attributed to Stewart Brand)

This is not a new notion. However, it keeps getting proved over and over again. Information flows everywhere (on all those interconnected devices). It hangs around forever (on old hard drives, legacy databases, and even on paper… which can be scanned). If you’re in an industry producing something that can be digitized, things are going change… (Rather than join the choir singing the recording industry’s demise, I’d rather give a glimpse of where it’s going next.)

This is changing our concepts of ourselves, of privacy, of indiscretion. We hear about employers looking up the MySpace pages of prospective employees.** The next generation has grown up with cameras everywhere (surveillance, phones, classrooms), so they’re comfortable with it.

About 60 percent of Internet users said they aren't worried about the extent of information about themselves online, despite increasing concern over how that data can be used.

"Googling Oneself is More Popular", New York Times, Dec. 16, 2007. (This doesn’t change the fact that they SHOULD be concerned… but that’s another story.)

Updates about high school/college friends, business associates, ex lovers/spouses are just a click away.We also know that information wants to be free—and get annoyed when we can’t get it.

For communicators, this can be as simple as understanding that you need to update your online newsroom regularly… and know that many of your materials are read directly rather than filtered by the media. It means that transparency is paramount… try and stonewall or obfuscate and 1) we’ll find the information you’re hiding and 2) we’ll make sure the world knows that we’re calling “bullshit!” on you. (When everyone has a printing press, we can all play investigative reporter… and there’s a reason that controversy makes a great story angle. And we LOVE transparency.)

In the Mashup spirit, we’ll comment in every way. We’ll link to your press materials. We’ll doctor your pictures. We’ll link to materials blasting or supporting your credibility. We’ll tear you apart. But we’ll also appreciate and support you joining the dialog, being forthright, and correcting yourself when you’re wrong. We’ll share our opinions with you in ways that can either frighten… or be some of the best market research feedback you can imagine.

To take this a step further up the “control” pipeline… why not specifically design your communications to take advantage of the fact of freedom? Put everything online traditionally in your newsroom, but also include it in a feed format, get to know the bloggers covering your industry and share it with them, learn how to share it (when appropriate) on Digg, del.icio.us, or Technorati. When is it smart to Twitter it? You can even add comments to articles in which you (or anyone else from your company) was quoted… Participate in the conversation. And realize that the transcript will likely be around forever.

Bottom line: Go with the Zen. To get your information out there, design it to be free.

** I have a feeling that this will become less and less of an issue as 1) kids figure out earlier on that they need to think further out when placing stuff online and 2) employers get a little more used to separating the personal and the professional online. (Analogous: 1992 presidential candidate Bill Clinton “didn’t inhale” when smoking weed, 2007 candidate Barak Obama said “of course I inhaled, that was the point.” Times and culture change.)

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This is post 14 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re all short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see SMG Law 6/ Measurement >

SMG Law #4: Mine!

We will customize everything online or on-device, including your ability to reach us. But we will also seek out what we want or need.

Truth: Your market, your audience, is out there.

Reality: Our ability to filter, reject, or otherwise ignore you is amplified 1,000 fold in social media. (And we won’t be kind about it.) But our ability to find EXACTLY what we want is the critical flip side to this.

This changes how communicators must think. If you want our attention, you have to earn it. You can be clever, funny, interesting, shocking, or needed… but you still have to earn it.

If you want to reach us, how does this translate? Into old-fashioned marketing speak. Know your audience.

Doing the research has never been easier… it’s right there at your keyboard. The way to understand this world is to participate in it. Be personal by getting to know the tools—and the communities—yourself. Know the way we talk with each other. Get to understand how we seek information. Get to know why we accept, promote, or weed stuff out. You might just find the tiny niche that really wants what you have to share.

I heard it said eloquently recently: Finding niche markets has never been easier… but it requires real homework. You don’t just get to go in and “flip the switch” on a community… it’s a dimmer and you have to turn it up gradually. Also, the communities ebb and flow… usually around a hot topic of the moment. It can draw participants like candles do moths. But they also fly away to the next thing that interests.

This reverses the way communicators have to think about audience. No longer can you just pick a publication, channel, show, or other corridor that reaches a “target demographic” (though the thinking does still have relevance). Now you have to do something that appeals to the audience and get them to come to you.

Bottom line:

Get to know us. Lurk where we hang out. Listen to our conversations (you might even want to have a conversation with us). Have something that actually captures us. Support something we care about.

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This is post 13 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see SMG Law 5/ Freedom >

SMG Law #3: Conversation

The one where the marketing-types go, "Aha! But... how?"

We need/want to talk to others… according to our rules. We seek them out according to our interests. We redefine and constantly migrate through “niches”. We will also engage, talk, and think collaboratively.

Authenticity is paramount. We can sense it. We will ignore or ridicule anyone who fails to present it…

Just as you cannot barge in on a conversation in person, you cannot barge in to the social media conversation. Think of how you enter a conversation at a party:

1. Listen in for a bit (online, it’s called lurking) to get a sense of the topic, the rules, and the personalities.
2. Gradually joining in by adding something interesting or fun (but always relevant) to the conversation (online, we hate “off-topic”).
3. Becoming accepted by the group.
4. Becoming a trusted member of the group.

Simple concept, but it takes some grace. (Heck, there’s even a wiki-based manual…)

This is why I'm so big on actually using the social media tools (at least gaining a basic understanding). If necessary, get your kids to show you how.

Online, you have to master a few other conversational elements… all of the ones we’ve spoken about before (beyond words and text, pictures, audio, and video). People are talking back and forth in each. We collectively rank and comment on news, blogs, pictures, video, and anything else we can attach as a file via social bookmarking sites (like Reddit). We post and share pictures via sites like Flickr and and MySpace, where we share our personalities by showing how we spend time.

Truth: The conversation(s) you seek to be a part of are out there, but you have to do the homework 1) to find them and 2) to learn how the conversation goes.

Case in point: The YouTube community had quite a bit to say about Oprah opening a YouTube “channel”. Much of it was about her violating their conversational protocols… I’m posting one of the nicer critiques. To see others, click the video itself, which will take you to a collection of similar response videos... watch a few and see how the form a conversation.

(If you're having trouble viewing the video, click through to YouTube to view it.)

There’s an online version of the lifespan of a conversational participant I’ve seen listed as:

• Discovery (you found a new conversational group)
• Lurking
• Tentative participation (to get feedback)
• Full participation
• Senior
• Elder

Bottom line: To be a part in any of the social media conversation, you have to participate.

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This is post 12 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see SMG Law 4/ Mine! >

SMG Law #2: Interconnection

If we can connect it, we will… regardless of how much sense this makes to you.

I give you the internet refrigerator and the internet watch as evidence. I'll also cite that the first "webcam" was aimed at a coffee pot so that the computer scientists at Cambridge could check to see if the coffee was ready. The jukebox at your local tavern now plays songs directly off the Internet... an has thousands of selections.

I thought the fridge idea was pretty stupid… until I was in a kitchen with one… and needed to look up a recipe. Now when I hear someone decrying something like "Why would you want to text when you could just call?" or "I can's see a use for a camera on a phone..." or "Why would you ever want to interact in a virtual worlds?" I just smile. Someone will always figure out a way to make the new connection brilliant.

Suddenly we're figuring out that it's handy to take a picture of the grocery store shelf, send it back to our spouse, and ask which brand of coffee they wanted...

Take this beyond technology:

1. Yes, it is every device we can possibly connect.
2. But, more importantly, it’s about people. We’re connecting to family, friends, lovers, customers, fans, audiences… ourselves.

The first makes the second easier.

Step up to more advanced devices… where you can get the World Wide Web on your PDA or phone. Pretty much everything on your desktop… and the devices will become simpler. Parents, high school and college friends, former lovers, will be just a click away for our entire lives.

Laptops, phones, televisions, stereos, cars, schools, companies, community, country, satellites, globe. All connected.

And where connection is impeded by bureaucracy, we'll find a way around. AT&T teased video phones as "the wave of the future" for several decades. We got tired of waiting and now we can do that with Skype and a cheap video camera.

Extend that to cultures and countries… Thomas Friedman, in The World is Flat, speaks about the next “wave”, as in generation. They will have grown up with all the technology that we think is “new”. To them, it is just the way things are. Being able to connect to others halfway around the world, including machine-assisted language translation, via a cell phone-based browser will be second nature.

Bottom line: When connected every way we can, social media will be a staple part of the landscape (not just something we do at our laptop or desktop).

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This is post 11 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re all short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see SMG Law 3/ Conversation >

SMG Law #1: Simplexity

simplicity + complexity (the only word I manufactured)

As humans, as cultures, as markets, we choose technology that makes given tasks simpler. This includes replacing an older technology with new, which happens at an incredible rate with computers, software, and networking.

That's where the change happens. We come up with myriads of (often unforeseen) uses for that technology, thereby humanizing it. This makes it complex in a completely new way.

Cars were once just a wealthy man's plaything. You had to turn a hand-crank to start them. There were few roads. We made them simpler. Henry Ford made them widely affordable. We created electric starters, windshield wipers, and turn signals. We built roads, then highways. Today, our entire culture is built around them. We wear them like clothes to tell others who we are (sedan, convertible, or minivan?). A driver's license is a rite of passage. Most of us would be hard-pressed to explain how they actually work, but we can start them remotely from our keyfob. That took just over a century.

Phones. An operator used to have to connect you by plugging in cables between the callers. All phones used to plug into the wall. Cell phones once required a briefcase. The small ones were brick-sized. Now they are smaller than our wallets... and do as much as our personal computers. The current college-age generation is the first not to know the concept of calling someone's house or office... they call the person. If they're not texting them... 911 is now flooded with calls after an accident 'cause everyone has a phone. (Heck, 911 exists entirely because of phones. As is 411... modern vocabulary staples.) Our entire list of friends is stored in our phone's memory. Suspicious spouses check their mate's "recent call" lists...

This applies a million- billion- trillion- fold to how people communicate online. By nature, computer-based devices, the software that makes them go, and the connections between them are endlessly re-configurable. We will take the things we love, make them better, make them easier... and then make them totally human.

Blogs are essentially an easy way to publish a web page... no programming knowledge needed. However, we've turned them into everyman's printing press. Now the blogosphere topples powerful figures (The Drudge Report is essentially a blog... it introduced us to Monica Lewinski; Dan Rather lost his job due to some voracious bloggers pointing out holes in his reporting...) Journalist surveys show that they check blogs on a regular basis for story leads. We're doing an amazing job of talking to ourselves. Add in images, audio clips, and video...

YouTube gave us all our own television channels. Video production used to require thousands of dollars... rooms of equipment. Even a few years ago, transferring video online required expertise to slice it into pieces for transfer over a phone line, then reassembling by the recipient. Now I have a $70 video editing tool on my laptop... and can create and upload videos with a few clicks. With simple video cameras and mashups, people now use YouTube to hold entire conversations. Activists are using it to reach us... politicians to speak to us... global politics involves all of us and not just ambassadors...

I'll even use it to further make my point. It's about what we've done to filing systems and libraries...



(If you're having trouble viewing the video, click through to YouTube to watch it.)

There are myriad (and ever-changing) examples I can cite... from Wikipedia, to the hundreds of social networking sites, (MySpace), to social bookmarking sites (Technorati) to new concepts like Twitter (broadcast text messaging for the masses).

It means that we now have the ability (and need to build the skills) to inexpensively and rapidly communicate in any of the mediums available - text, image, video - and that we will use them extensively... which means that our vocabularies and creativity will build... we will teach each other the same way we learn from each other how to converse in words. Through participation, our vocabularies will grow.

It means we will rapidly share those things that most interest us... from beautiful, to surprising, to maddening, to sexy, obscene, and funny, brilliant, and just well-said. It means that you don't want to have your customer support run us around because we'll record and broadcast the call, but it also means that we will (and now have the ability) to tell the world we're happy with something you did.

So, when it comes to social media, the bottom line is:

1. As a market, as a culture, as a planet, we are going to keep making the technologies we love easier to use and more accessible.
   
2. We will make them complex in a whole new way by humanizing them.

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This is post 10 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see SMG Law 2/ Interconnection >

Concept: Collaboration

A lot more than just working together.

Professional communicators (the marketing/PR types) like to “control the message”. Social media seems to erode this control. Truth is, they probably never had message control… that fact's just a lot more transparent now.

Though these communicators are highly skilled at conveying messages in traditional media like newspapers, radio, and television, those messages take on a life of their own once the audience has received them. Conversations that used to take place over dinner, at the water cooler, and in the bars, now happen in recorded format—text, audio, and video online. Take a look at the comments section on any video or social bookmarking site… take a look at the comments posted to blogs and online newspaper articles.

This leads us to an interesting phenomenon best illustrated by the success of Wikipedia. Anyone can pop in and edit an article. It seems this would create chaos. However, the system turns out to be self-policing. There are some mechanisms set up to help with this (a volunteer-based review process for any new postings/edits). Rather than try and explain it all, I’ll let Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tell you himself...(Note: video is 20 minutes, but it's a mind-opener.)

(If you're having trouble viewing the video, click through to the TED site to view it.)

Note: Wikipedia is based on wiki software, which is designed as a collaborative tool. Essentially, a web page editor (similar to a word processor) that anyone can log into and edit. It automatically saves every edit and version, which means that you can revert to an earlier version if the new one doesn’t pass muster. This means a whole team can work directly on the same document together. There is only one document (it can have many pages or sections), so you’re not shuttling around copies via email. (Wikis have been described as “The never-ending brainstorm with a photographic memory.” Many versions to choose from: try wiki.com or pbwiki. Google has also created collaborative office documents (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) that, for the user, function in a similar manner.

Trust the crowds… In The Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki points out that groups of people have a knack for coming up with smart answers to questions collectively. The crowd doesn’t dumb down its smartest members or get dragged down by its lesser ones. It tends to get to the real truth. Those who are freaks on either side of an issue tend to be tempered by those who are considerate on any issue. Communicators know these individuals as “opinion leaders”.

The blogosphere also operates via massive collaboration. Blog services/software is constructed specifically to allow comments, cross-linking (between web sites, including other blogs), and archive searches. The blog community invites and rewards commenting. It has lead to a value system, particularly among the more popular blogs, that rewards transparency (citing and linking to sources), as well as vigorous debate between bloggers and their audiences. They value opinion, intelligence, and logic. This includes the fact that they are less concerned about the accuracy of any one entry… and are much more concerned about correcting an incorrect fact or post.

Even blogs like walmartsucks, which would scare the bejezus out of most marketing/PR types, turn out to be subject to this crowd wisdom. (This type of site exists for pretty much any well-known company or organization.) Sure, it's gathered some angry, some freaky, and maybe even some justified complainers. But the rational side of the crowd tempers this. Truth is, it works like a virtual complaint/comment box, where the company can pinpoint legitimate complaints that it needs to act on.

Bottom line: Social media makes collaboration easy and powerful… and therefore values collaboration. Trust the crowd.

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This is post 9 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see SMG Law 1/ Simplexity >

Concept: Tags

Simple. Powerful. Like being able to click "order" on chaos...

Truth: You have to play with tags a bit to get the hang of it. Once you do, you’ll wonder how we ever lived without them.

From the tag “help” file on del.ic.ious (I recommend reading the entire page… it’s illuminating)

“Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your [items] to help you organize and remember them. Tags are a little bit like keywords, but they're chosen by you, and they do not form a hierarchy. You can assign as many tags to a [item] as you like and rename or delete the tags later. So, tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.”

Differentiation: Tags are different from “categories”. Categories pre-suppose a file-system-like hierarchy and a centralized dictator of both the categories and the hierarchy. Tags are free-form.

Steal them, share them: You can see what others used as tags (which means you don’t have to make them all up) AND you can share tags socially so that you can see what others are including on the same tag.

It’s a little like organizing without organizing. Imagine a pile of stuff on your desk. You need everything related to your taxes. Click the tag “taxes” and everything—filings, IRS forms, relevant receipts, your checkbook, and even envelopes for mailing your payments organizes itself on your desk. Need everything related to a particular client? Click “client” and all the important files, receipts (even the ones that were also tagged “taxes”) pops up. You no longer have to decide which file should hold which items.

This blog uses tags. (Blogger happens to call them "labels", but they work the same.) At the end of each post is a list of these tags. Click one and the blog will reorganize itself according to that tag. All of the tags appear in the "tag cloud" at the top of the sidebar column. Selecting one of these will also reorganize the blog.

A note on del.ic.ious: Tags are used extensively across social media… you see them all over blogs (to quickly sort posts that you might want to read), video sites, and you can even tag photos on sites like Flicker and MySpace so that you can rapidly sort them according to which friends appear in them, which trip you were on, which location, year, etc. I refer to del.ic.ious for two reasons:

1. They have one of the best descriptions of tags that I’ve found.
2. If you embrace only one social media site, this is the one. It’s a portable version of your browsers “favorites” or “bookmarks” function. That means you can access it via any computer with an Internet connection. The tags function makes it really powerful… and it’s a great way to figure tags out. Plus, it adds in the power of the crowd... which helps you find great stuff and tag it just so.
   

Again, someone said it better than I:

(If you're having trouble viewing the video, click through to YouTube to watch it.)

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This is post 6 in a series of 17 (“yikes!?” no, they’re short) establishing my “7 Laws of Social Media Gestalt”. These initial posts give a solid tour of social media and a basis for following (and participating in) future posts. For more, see Concept: Feeds/Aggregators >.