How WIKIS WORK

Wikis are websites that allow people to contribute or edit content on them. They are great for collaborative working, for instance creating a large document or project plan with a team in several offices. A wiki can be as private or as open as the people who create it want it to be.

The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that was started in 2001. It now has over 2.5 million articles in English alone6 and over a million members. In 2005 the respected scientific journal Nature conducted a study7 into the reliability of the scientific entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. No one was surprised that Encyclopaedia Britannica was the more reliable of the two – what was remarkable was that it was only marginally more accurate. The Encyclopedia Britannica team issued a 20-page rebuttal of the study a few months later. 

Others observed that while Encyclopaedia Britannica had no entries for wiki, Wikipedia has a 2,500 word article on Encyclopaedia Britannica, its history and methodology. But Wikipedia is more than a reference source. During a major breaking news story, especially one which affects large numbers of people directly, such a natural disaster or political crisis, Wikipedia acts as a collective reporting function.

Trying out wikis…

Everyone knows Wikipedia, here are some other examples of large wiki projects that you can take a look at and even participate in:

Wikia

A community of wikis on different subjects

wikiHow

A practical ‘how to’ manual for everything from making coffee to writing business plans

Wikinews

Wikipedia’s news project

You can start your own public wiki in the Wikia community, or look at the technology’s possibilities for team working by trying out the services from companies like JotSpot and Socialtext.

How WIKIS WORK

Wikis are websites that allow people to contribute or edit content on them. They are great for collaborative working, for instance creating a large document or project plan with a team in several offices. A wiki can be as private or as open as the people who create it want it to be.

The most famous wiki is of course Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that was started in 2001. It now has over 2.5 million articles in English alone6 and over a million members. In 2005 the respected scientific journal Nature conducted a study7 into the reliability of the scientific entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. No one was surprised that Encyclopaedia Britannica was the more reliable of the two – what was remarkable was that it was only marginally more accurate. The Encyclopedia Britannica team issued a 20-page rebuttal of the study a few months later. 

Others observed that while Encyclopaedia Britannica had no entries for wiki, Wikipedia has a 2,500 word article on Encyclopaedia Britannica, its history and methodology. But Wikipedia is more than a reference source. During a major breaking news story, especially one which affects large numbers of people directly, such a natural disaster or political crisis, Wikipedia acts as a collective reporting function.

Trying out wikis…

Everyone knows Wikipedia, here are some other examples of large wiki projects that you can take a look at and even participate in:

Wikia

A community of wikis on different subjects

wikiHow

A practical ‘how to’ manual for everything from making coffee to writing business plans

Wikinews

Wikipedia’s news project

You can start your own public wiki in the Wikia community, or look at the technology’s possibilities for team working by trying out the services from companies like JotSpot and Socialtext.

How social networks work

Social networks on the web are like contained versions of the sprawling blog network. People joining a social network usually create a profile and then build a network by connecting to friends and contacts in the network, or by inviting real-world contacts and friends to join the social network.These communities retain the interest of their members by being useful to them and providing services that are entertaining or help them to expand their networks. MySpace, for instance, allows members to create vivid, chaotic home pages (they’ve been likened to the walls of a teenager’s bedroom) to which they can upload images, videos and music.

MYSPACE

MySpace has built a lot of its popularity around its music services. There are said to be over three million bands and musicians registered on it, trying to attract a fan base from the 200 million registered accounts. According to Hitwise, in September 2006 MySpace was the 8th largest referrer of traffic to HMV.co.uk, more even than the MSN search engine.

FACEBOOK

In 2007, Facebook, a social network that originated in US colleges, became available for public use in the UK. Its popularity quickly rocketed.Part of Facebook’s success is its creators’ decision to ‘open up’ and allow anyone to develop applications and run them on Facebook - without charging them. This has seen Facebook users able to play each other at Scrabble and Chess, compare each others’ tastes and send ‘virtual gifts’, among any number of new ideas vying for attention.

BEBO

Bebo, which is popular among school-age children, actually has the most members, perhaps helped by the fact that it is grouped around schools and colleges.Crucially, the growth in the use of social networks by young people in recent years has come at the expense of their consumption of traditional media such as TV and magazines. This switch in behaviour was one of the drivers behind the biggest deal in social media to date, when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for US $580 million. Marketers have also increasingly begun to experiment with trying to reach the members of MySpace and other social networks. Bebo hosts pages for many children’s authors for instance, while MySpace has seen a rush of marketing efforts from Toyota to the US Army.

Perhaps the most ‘grown-up’ of the popular networks is LinkedIn, which allows users build their business and professional contacts into an online network. It has been criticised for not being open enough and for charging for too many of its services – but next to Facebook it is still the most popular online social network among people aged 25 and over. The huge success of the ‘opening up’ of Facebook,as mentioned above, could be a challenge to LinkedIn’s ‘closed’ approach in the future.

How social networks work

Social networks on the web are like contained versions of the sprawling blog network. People joining a social network usually create a profile and then build a network by connecting to friends and contacts in the network, or by inviting real-world contacts and friends to join the social network.These communities retain the interest of their members by being useful to them and providing services that are entertaining or help them to expand their networks. MySpace, for instance, allows members to create vivid, chaotic home pages (they’ve been likened to the walls of a teenager’s bedroom) to which they can upload images, videos and music.

MYSPACE

MySpace has built a lot of its popularity around its music services. There are said to be over three million bands and musicians registered on it, trying to attract a fan base from the 200 million registered accounts. According to Hitwise, in September 2006 MySpace was the 8th largest referrer of traffic to HMV.co.uk, more even than the MSN search engine.

FACEBOOK

In 2007, Facebook, a social network that originated in US colleges, became available for public use in the UK. Its popularity quickly rocketed.Part of Facebook’s success is its creators’ decision to ‘open up’ and allow anyone to develop applications and run them on Facebook - without charging them. This has seen Facebook users able to play each other at Scrabble and Chess, compare each others’ tastes and send ‘virtual gifts’, among any number of new ideas vying for attention.

BEBO

Bebo, which is popular among school-age children, actually has the most members, perhaps helped by the fact that it is grouped around schools and colleges.Crucially, the growth in the use of social networks by young people in recent years has come at the expense of their consumption of traditional media such as TV and magazines. This switch in behaviour was one of the drivers behind the biggest deal in social media to date, when Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for US $580 million. Marketers have also increasingly begun to experiment with trying to reach the members of MySpace and other social networks. Bebo hosts pages for many children’s authors for instance, while MySpace has seen a rush of marketing efforts from Toyota to the US Army.

Perhaps the most ‘grown-up’ of the popular networks is LinkedIn, which allows users build their business and professional contacts into an online network. It has been criticised for not being open enough and for charging for too many of its services – but next to Facebook it is still the most popular online social network among people aged 25 and over. The huge success of the ‘opening up’ of Facebook,as mentioned above, could be a challenge to LinkedIn’s ‘closed’ approach in the future.

How social media works…

Now let’s take a look at each of the main types of social media, and how they work. These explanations are intentionally very general, because with social media every rule seems to have an exception. In fact, among the defining characteristics of social media are the blurring of definitions, rapid innovation, reinvention and mash-ups. Each explanation also has a section on how to try out that form of social media yourself, with pointers on both how to find social media that’s relevant to you and how you might go about creating it. If you want to really understand how social media works, there’s no better way than to take part in it.



Mash-ups
the combination of two or more pieces of content (or software, or websites) is one of the phenomena in social media that make it at once so exciting, fast-moving and sometimes bewildering. Mash-ups are possible because of the openness of social
media – many websites and software developers encourage people to play with their services and reinvent them.

There are literally hundreds of mash-ups of the Google Earth service, where people have attached information to parts of the maps. For instance there is a UK rail service mash-up where you can track in real time where trains are on the map. Fans of the TV series 24 have mapped locations from the shows’ plotlines on to a Google Earth map.

A popular type of mash-up cannibalises different pieces of content, typically videos and music. Popular videos on YouTube can spawn hundreds of imitations, homages and (frequently) comic reinterpretations. In communities like this, the number of mash-ups a piece of content spawns is often an indicator of its popularity.

How social media works…

Now let’s take a look at each of the main types of social media, and how they work. These explanations are intentionally very general, because with social media every rule seems to have an exception. In fact, among the defining characteristics of social media are the blurring of definitions, rapid innovation, reinvention and mash-ups. Each explanation also has a section on how to try out that form of social media yourself, with pointers on both how to find social media that’s relevant to you and how you might go about creating it. If you want to really understand how social media works, there’s no better way than to take part in it.



Mash-ups
the combination of two or more pieces of content (or software, or websites) is one of the phenomena in social media that make it at once so exciting, fast-moving and sometimes bewildering. Mash-ups are possible because of the openness of social
media – many websites and software developers encourage people to play with their services and reinvent them.

There are literally hundreds of mash-ups of the Google Earth service, where people have attached information to parts of the maps. For instance there is a UK rail service mash-up where you can track in real time where trains are on the map. Fans of the TV series 24 have mapped locations from the shows’ plotlines on to a Google Earth map.

A popular type of mash-up cannibalises different pieces of content, typically videos and music. Popular videos on YouTube can spawn hundreds of imitations, homages and (frequently) comic reinterpretations. In communities like this, the number of mash-ups a piece of content spawns is often an indicator of its popularity.

Basic forms of social media

At this time, there are basically six kinds of social media. Note, though, that innovation and change are rife.

Social networks
these sites allow people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share content and communication. The biggest social networks are MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

Blogs
perhaps the best known form of social media, blogs are online journals, with entries appearing with the most recent first.



Wikis
these websites allow people to add content to or edit the information on them, acting as a communal document or database. The best-known wiki is Wikipedia4, the online encyclopaedia which has over 2 million English language articles.

Podcasts
audio and video files that are available by subscription, through services like Apple iTunes.

Forums
areas for online discussion, often around specific topics and interests. Forums came about before the term “social media” and are a powerful and popular element of online communities.

Content communities
communities which organise and share particular kinds of content. The most popular content communities tend to form around photos (Flickr), bookmarked links (del.icio.us) and videos (YouTube).

Microblogging
social networking combined with bite-sized blogging, where small amounts of content (‘updates’) are distributed online and through the mobile phone network. Twitter is the clear leader in this field.