Bill Burnham, a VC who blogs wrote this:
"...despite all the hype about social networking, it has now become readily apparent that social networking is not an application in and of itself, but rather a by-product of other activities. While Friendster represents the previous social networking orthodoxy of having the social network itself be the application, MySpace, and now Yahoo 360, reflect the new understanding that social networking will be just one aspect of a fully encompassing online "social environment".
I think that is right. The idea that combined online services are more of a state of mind than an application. This led me to think a bit about the term social content. It's a term that more aptly defines what I think is really going on with a shared flickr photo or a much commented on article. Of course no idea hasn't been had before so a quick Google search led me to this social sharing service tutorial post on Corante's many-to-many blog .
"Social content services have a strong emphasis on implicit social discovery. Users use these services to organize their own content for later recollection. But since the services are public, other users can peek into the collective space, and discover similar items, topics or persons. We’re going to look for opportunities in this project to stress the ‘synthesis’ aspect of social discovery; to escape from the pattern of curated collections managed and presented by one person.
I've been thinking lately about how a traditional publisher can move or integrate their content in to a freer space and as I wrote earlier in this post I think it has to do with mindset. It's embracing the "synthesis aspect" and the idea that the content you produce can be used in whatever way the audience wants to make it more valuable to themselves by adding to it, sharing it, integrating it, commenting on it, and rating it. That you are seeding a discussion and that that discussion may take place somewhere outside of your control.
