Social+Media

=SOCIAL MEDIA=



Technical Description
Social media sites allow users to upload audio, video, and image files to a website, and allow other users to follow that stream of files as new ones appear. The streams can either be user specific, or topic specific. Users can tag a file and then any user that also has that tag can be included in the stream. All of the sites allow comments on the files, so that a conversation and feedback can happen about the content.

The most popular image site is Flickr. Users upload photos, tag them, and then allow people to view them. There is a slideshow functionality so that users can just play a whole album and see all the photos. The most popular video site is YouTube, though Vimeo is close behind. YouTube users can upload a movie up to 10 minutes in length. Users can tag the item and offer a description. Instead of streams, YouTube has channels that other users can subscribe to. The users can then be kept up to date on new videos.

For audio files, blogs usually host the files, or for podcasts, the creators can get them on iTunes. Users can then subscribe to the podcast via an RSS feed, either in their newsreader, or in iTunes itself. New podcasts then can pulled whenever the podcast aggregator updates.

These social media sites are usually linked to blogs, microblogs, or social network sites. Users then can follow the creator in multiple different ways on multiple different mediums.

Educational Usage
Social media sites have limited use in the classroom. Students can go to those sites for research purposes. They can get information via image, audio, or video files. Teachers can maintain accounts and keep parents up to date about what is happening in the classroom. Students can make podcasts though, and the teacher can upload them to their blog. That is a fun project, especially when they can write their own script, act in the podcast, and edit it.

Here is an example podcast: media type="custom" key="6678315" align="center"