Journalism students from the Dutsch university of applied sciences in Utrecht are currently conducting a survey about the popularity of social media – if you run a popular blog, the questionnaire probably already arrived in your inbox. All interviews with social media experts will be published on the crossmedialab homepage – good questions, I'm really curious about the results of the study and my colleagues' answers, just mailed mine to Wolfgang.
How long have you been working with online social media and what was your reason to get into this topic?
The question is: which online services do qualify as ?social media?? I?ve started using the internet in 1994 ? out of mere curiosity. A couple of years later I started working as a web designer for APA (Austria Press Agency). At the same time, 3 fellow students from the department of science of communication and me launched the platform medianexus.net ? a community site for publishing ?grey? student literature about media-related topics. The project doesn?t exist anymore, the site is archived in the Austrian National Library though. The comment function was one our most important features back than ? and even though services like Facebook and Twitter were lurking in the far future, we used e-mail and mailing lists for discussion and organisation purposes.
To me, there is no clear-cut between ?Web 1.0? and ?Web 2.0? ? technologies have evolved, dynamic web applications did replaced static content. So the new tools fuel the use of social media, but the basic principle of enabling dialogue and connecting people has been one of the main strengths of the internet from the beginning. Read more
