Social Media, Defined

[I am reprinting this from Get Real — originally published 6 December 2005 — since a number of folks (@socialtechno, and others) were discussing the earlier post and my definition of social media, which I think holds up pretty well today, although I would enlarge it beyond blog posts and the blogosphere to include a greater range of social tools, now.]

I was having coffee with Ian Kennedy and Havi Hoffman of Yahoo this morning in Palo Alto, just catching up, and Ian asked me for a short definition of “social media”. I temporized, saying I would root around in the archives and see what I had in the way of elevator-speak on the subject.

Here’s an attempt:

Social Media are those forms of publishing that are based on a dynamic interaction, a conversation, between the author and active readers, in contrast with traditional broadcast media where the ‘audience’ is a passive ‘consumer’ of ‘content’. The annotations or social gestures left behind by active readers, such as comments, tags, bookmarks, and trackbacks, create an elaborate topology resting on the foundational blog posts, and this enhanced meta-environment, the blogosphere, is the context for and the realization of a global collaboration to make sense of the world and our place in it.