Thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s survey. Two-thirds of you say that you use social networking tools. One-third of you say that you do not or that you’re not sure. The trick in this question is that by many definitions, blogging and reading blogs are social networking activities, therefore … well, you see my point.
Or maybe you don’t. As several responders commented, the terms “web 2.0,” “social networking,” and “social networking tools” are ambiguous at best. All three terms are often misunderstood, and there’s no universal agreement on what’s meant by or included in any of them. I’ll include some links to additional information at the end of this post, and you can come to your own conclusions. Regardless of your definition, however, please keep in mind that this is a blog post, more akin to casual conversation with a friend than to a scholarly treatise or formal classroom instruction.
I’m going to use “social networking” to mean any online tools we use to build networks and communities around our common interest in nature. To my way of thinking, this includes not only blogs and feed readers, flickr, twitter, bookmarking sites like delicious.com, facebook and myspace, stumbleupon and technorati, but also the comments, trackbacks, blogrolls, blog carnivals, and memes that connect us to each other.
No survey this week, but I encourage you to leave a comment or question in response to this post. What social networking tools do you use? Which ones would you like to learn in more detail, whether you’re currently using them or not? What would you like talk about? I look forward to hearing from you.
More information about social networking can be found at:
Video: Social Media in Plain English
More of my bookmarks on social networking
3 Comments
I’ll get the ball rolling.
I use Facebook, but only recently for anything related to my blog. I haven’t found an application I really like to that end.
With regard to all the other stuff, I don’t use any, mostly out of ignorance more than anything. I look forward to hearing anyone else’s experiences in those realms.
I’m on facebook. I tried to signed up for delicious, digg and the others and got confused. I need to learn how use them. In truth, I don’t know how to use track back, either.
One of the keys to successful social networking is having a critical mass of community members using a tool. Hopefully, we’ll all be learning together what the best tools for the community of nature bloggers are.