After years and months of assuming they knew what we were talking about, Debbie compiled some user-friendly definitions from Wikipedia to give some of our clients the 411 on the changing media landscape.

1. Social media

Social Media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.

A few prominent examples of social media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Gather.com (social networking),YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing) and Miniclip (game sharing). These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs to allow users to interact.

2. User Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) refers to various kinds of media content that are produced or primarily influenced by end-users, as opposed to traditional media producers, licensed broadcasters and production companies. The term came into the mainstream during 2005 in web publishing and new media content production circles. It reflects the expansion of media production through new technologies that are accessible and affordable to the general public. These include digital video, blogging, podcasting, mobile phone photography and wikis. In addition to these technologies, user-generated content may also employ a combination of open source, free software, and flexible licensing or related agreements to further diminish the barriers to collaboration, skill-building and discovery.

3. Social Networking

Facebook

Facebook is a social networking website. It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone with an email address. People can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region. As of February 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 25 million members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks). Facebook is the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 6 million photos uploaded daily. It is also the sixth most visited site in the United States. The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks that colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community.

MySpace

MySpace is a popular social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally. According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the world’s fifth most popular English-language website, the fifth most popular website in any language, and the third most popular website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various weeks. The service has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80% of visits to online social networking websites. It has become an increasingly influential part of contemporary popular culture, especially in English speaking countries. With the 100 millionth account being created on August 9, 2006, in The Netherlands and a news story claiming 106 million accounts on September 8, 2006, the site reportedly attracts new registrations at a rate of 230,000 per day.

Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in October 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, or through an application. For SMS, currently three gateway numbers are available: short codes for the USA and Canada and a UK number for international use. While the Twitter service is free, posting and receiving updates via SMS may incur charges from the wireless carrier.

4. Blogs

A blog (short for web log) is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order. Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media. In May 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 71 million blogs. Popular South African blog search engines are Amatomu and Afrigator.

5. MXit

MXit (pronounced “mix it”) is a mobile instant messaging application developed in South Africa that runs on GPRS/3G mobile phones with java support. It allows the user to send and receive text messages to and from PCs that are connected to the Internet and other phones running MXit. These messages are sent and received via the mobile Internet, rather than with standard SMS technology. The user can also exchange messages with online chat communities like MSN Messenger, ICQ, and Jabber. Messages are limited to 2 000 characters. Because messages are billed by the amount of data sent, they are much cheaper to send than traditional SMS messages.MXit claims to have a registered userbase of over three million, about five million log-ons per day and over 100 million messages sent per day. The application is distributed internationally, but the bulk of its userbase are South Africans.

6. Podcasts

A podcast is a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers. A podcast is a specific type of webcast which, like ‘radio’, can mean either the content itself or the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. The term “podcast” is a portmanteau of the name of Apple’s portable music player, the iPod, and broadcast a “pod” refers to a container of some sort, and “cast” to the idea of broadcasting. In other words, a podcast is a collection of files (usually audio and video) residing at a unique web feed address. People can “subscribe’ to this feed by submitting the feed address to an aggregator (like itunes). When new “episodes” become available in the podcast they will be automatically downloaded to that users computer. Unlike radio, or streaming content on the web podcasts are not real-time. There is no live broadcast of content, the material is pre-recorded and users can check out the material at their leisure, offline. Though podcasters’ web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their content, a podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.

Video podcast (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures. The term is an evolution specialized for video, coming from the generally audio-based podcast and referring to the distribution of video where the RSS feed is used as a non-linear TV channel to which consumers can subscribe using a PC, TV, set-top box, media center or mobile multimedia device.

A phonecast is similar to a radio or broadcast television program but designed for internet transmission to a mobile phone. Mobile phone software allows a user to connect to a media server within the wireless carrier network, which is distributing (phonecasting) the phonecast, and displays the audio or video content to the user’s mobile device. A phonecast can be either live or pre-recorded for on-demand use after the live broadcast. Phonecasting differs from podcasting, which assumes a transfer or download from a desktop PC and is on-demand only. Phonecasting does not require a desktop PC and connects directly to the carrier’s network.

7. Web jockey

A Web Jockey (also called WJ or dubjay or webjay or webjock) is a term for an “on web” host or talent who selects and presents prerecorded media for a targeted audience. Analogous to a “disc jockey” for radio or a “video jockey” on television, a Web Jockey is a live personality on the internet entertaining, guiding and interacting with viewers through a show, presentation, videocast or webcast. An emerging term the WEB 2.0 for an Online Presenter, the term “web jockey” is derived from the VJ and the DJ. The principl aspects of the web jockey that sets it apart from its predecessors are that it is on the internet and also that it is interactive. The audience plays a much stronger role as a result of the onine user’s access to the web jockey, as compared to the the one-way, linear mediums of television and radio. A “dubjay” is part host, part presenter, part friend and hence has a close and personal relationship with the audience. Mistress Juliya (VJ from Fuse Television) was one of the first Webjay’s online, setting up a live webcam and videocasting a daily show from her personal computer that was watched by millions.

8. Second Life

Second Life (abbreviated as SL) is an Internet-based virtual world which came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007. Developed by Linden Lab, a downloadable client program enables its users, called “Residents”, to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. Second Life is one of several virtual worlds that have been inspired by the cyberpunk literary movement, and particularly by Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. However, Second Life is in a virtual world class of its own. The stated goal of Linden Lab is to create a world like the Metaverse described by Stephenson, a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. Second Life’s virtual currency is the Linden Dollar (Linden, or L$) and is exchangeable for US Dollars in a marketplace consisting of residents, Linden Lab and real life companies. In all, more than six million accounts have been registered, although many are inactive, and some Residents have multiple accounts. Despite its prominence, Second Life has notable competitors, including Active Worlds, There, and newcomers such as Entropia Universe, Dotsoul Cyberpark, Red Light Center, and Kaneva.

9. Mashup

A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. Content used in mashups is typically sourced from a third party via a public interface or API, although some in the community believe that only cases where public interfaces are not used count as mashups. Other methods of sourcing content for mashups include Web feeds (e.g. RSS or Atom), web services and Screen scraping. Many people are experimenting with mashups using Google, eBay, Amazon, AOL, Windows Live, and Yahoos APIs.