Network tools and categories

There are some buzz words trying to categorize some of the offerings on the internet. First, some definitions.

Media: Text, pictures, video, and sound.

Audience: The recipients of media.

Social: 2 way interactions with groups of people. Among business associates, this is also called networking. The social audience is typically a dozen to the low hundreds.

Advertising: Announcing news with a pointer to some content.

Broadcasting: 1 way information dissemination usually to an anonymous audience. The audience of broadcasts can be scaled up to thousands or millions.

• Facebook, linkedin, and Myspace would be examples of social media.
• Email among personal contacts is also social media. It is sharing media with contacts.
  
• Email lists sent by companies is broadcasting and advertising.
  
• Chat rooms and virtual worlds are social interaction, not social media.
• Webcam chat rooms, like stickam and justin TV are also social interaction.
  
• YouTube and blogger, wordpress, et. al. would be examples of broadcasting to an audience. Although there are comments, I don't consider the initial post to be the beginning of a conversation.
• Twitter can be many things. From a personal account with a small group of followers, it can be considered social media. If the account is corporate, it could be advertising.
• Shared bookmarks (such as delicious and digg) are also advertising, not "social bookmarking".
  

Twitter tools

I found some twitter tools. They can be found on my social and communication page. I will highlight them here.

For general posting and viewing, I like tweetree. Seesmic is pretty good, too. The advantage of tweetree is that it shows some content of links inline and offers threading of replies. Two other threading mentions are twonvo and tweet convo.

Hash tags are those words which begin with "#". To find hash tag definitions, I like to use tagdef.

Finally, to see what everyone is talking about, you can use a tag cloud map, or "listorious", a list of popular lists.

A web site for posting pictures to twitter is twitpic. To share music on twitter, go to blip fm.

That's all for now. If you know anything useful, leave a comment.