Today I was reading an interesting article by Dion Hinchcliffe about the emergence of mass social media. Dion gives an effective overview of what social media is and how it’s making a difference (in addition to providing the beautiful diagram above). He also outlines a few key components of social media:

1. Communication in the form of conversation, not monologue. - I discussed this yesterday in my article, Democracy 2.0. Blogs are enabling people to become part of a conversation rather than just having content forced at them.
2. Participants are people not organizations.
3. Honesty and transparency are core values.
4. Push not pull. - People now search for content they are interested in rather than having the media pushed at them.
5. Distribution instead of centralization. - While the sources of content may be biased now, the plethora of content sources enable readers to seek multiple viewpoints.

If you want to read more about social media, I suggest checking out Spannerworks report on social media. I can assure you that you will be hearing more about the impact of social media on this blog in the future.