There is an omnipresent intelligence on the Finnish web and her name is Pauliina Mäkelä. Wherever I roam, I never seem able to “be the first among [my Facebook] friends” to "like" any page on the .fi domain space (and beyond).
I just want to express my gratitude to Pauliina for her responsiveness, proactivity, sense of initiative.
The other day I was trying to identify the most relevant Finnish-based social media services for the purpose of monitoring public conversations on the Net.
It’s something I was working on for our media intelligence product, Cluetail Radar Pro. For one of our customers I had already set up a way to monitor and analyse their brand exposure on a broad range of Finnish mainstream media websites. So now I needed to expand into the Finnish social web.
I tweeted my need, and fired a handful of emails to people in my network who might be able to give me a head start.
Not only did Pauliina swiftly reply; she offered a collaborative solution by setting up a Facebook page to draft a directory of Finnish social media sites. Fantastic!
And just yesterday, following a suggestion by Johanna Janhonen, Pauliina created this wiki page.
Defining the Social Web
Now, looking at the list and reading some of the comments triggered a few follow-up thoughts in me.
I noticed that several people mentioned sites like Heiaheia and Habbo Hotel, which caused me to realise that people think about different things when using the term “social media”.
So what I would like to do is to make a distinction between “social media”, the “Social Web”, and “social journalism”. (Perhaps they are synonymous to “new media”, the New Internet, and “new journalism” - but I’m not sure yet)
The widest in scope is the Social Web. I’ll have a go at a definition:
The Social Web is a construct of Internet infrastructure and services which enable and facilitate that the way Internet users sense, think and act on-line is a function of other users’ on-line behavior.
I am a journalist by training and have been working as a journalist or communications expert for the most part of my career, mostly on-line. I have always interpreted “social media” as an advanced form of “media”.
"Social" is nothing new
As I tend to point out in my presentations at seminars, “media” have always been “social”. They’ve always had a function in society, the facts and values expressed in the media have always had a social impact, and there have always been social feedback mechanisms for the “users” of the media (i.e. readers, listeners, viewers).
Hence, when we include the qualifier “social” in “social media”, we talk about the degree to which media are social, i.e. the degree to which the way the media behave is a function of their social relationships, in particular the behavior of their users.
The web has not invented social media, but it has significantly advanced the social component of the media, in particular the way the users can influence the conversation in and about the media.
So, what’s interesting to me is to find that people add services to a shared list of social media which I wouldn’t have come up with. Habbo Hotel has a large component of user-generated content. Heiaheia is clearly built around the “social object” of logging, sharing and discussing physical exercise.
(And to add a non-Finnish example:) Amazon.com makes personalized purchase recommendations based on the purchases of previous users.
Yes, this is all social software. It’s the social web. But is it media?
For those who see media as an industry, a business, probably yes.
What remains is... "journalism"
Which means that for my purposes, I need a narrower concept. One that emphasizes journalism and public discourse. Possible terms within this scope include “new journalism” or “social journalism”.
Setting aside the now familiar objection that indeed, also “journalism” has always been “social” and taking into consideration that it won’t be “new” forever, we may soon be left with simply “journalism”.
And yet, what’s happening is a qualitative shift, not just a quantitative one. We need a term that expresses the historical change.
Jay Rosen and Dave Winer call it “the rebooted system of news”. They say that, once the news system has been rebooted, we will also have a rebooted political system.
I’m their biggest fan, yet I’ve been reluctant to accept that it’s just news that we’re talking about. (Again, as a journalist, when I think of “news”, I think of news reports and news reporting. When I think of “journalism” however, I tend to associate it also with opinion, analysis, conversation, discussion and debate)
But I digress... so, let’s cut this short.
I am most interested in how people on-line converse about certain brands, certain people, certain events, and certain topics.
What I was looking for were the most influential (Finnish-based) web services which facilitate conversation by Internet users around any topic in the public domain.
Pauliina, even though the scope of your list is a bit broader than I anticipated, I certainly found what I was looking for on. Thanks again!
Recent Comments