Arent you putting pretty much the entire Internet under the umbrella of social media here? E-mail makes distance irrelevant, being able to listen to the Yankees game 3000 miles away over the Internet makes distance irrelevant, all kinds of things that I wouldn't label as social media per se (like your website itself!) make distance irrelevant. Are all those things "social media"? - Robert Seidman

Robert: to your point, I have left things a bit broad and I may need to look at that again. However, I *do* consider blogs to be "social media". - Mark Dykeman

Commented on your post (too long for Friendfeed) ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

It is nice that you guys always discussing Social Media theory. I welcome you to participate in Social Media Advocacy http://friendfeed.com/e... - Igor The Troll

I have to agree with Robert on this one. The internet itself is the delivery agent, I was writing websites and communicating with people all over the world in 95, pre-social media and/ or blogging. - Duncan Riley

I would say that Social media is the evolution of social text, just like hypermedia is the evolution of hypertext. So I'd define "Social Text" by us people using _tools_ like emails, IRC and news groups to exchange "textual" information. Now we still do the same but we take it to another level: sounds, videos, pictures... Hence my conclusion: Internet has been and will always be "social" :) - directeur

like: directeur's comment, my pov too :) - mike "glemak" dunn

Good input, folks. A telephone can make distance irrelevant and no one's been putting that under the social media umbrella either... or should we? - Mark Dykeman

Pressed ENTER too quickly... directeur, you have an interesting line of thinking there. I hadn't been thinking about the concepts of "social text" or "hypermedia". - Mark Dykeman

Everything we do now is just an extension of what we have done before but it's just a question of scale. Megaphone, telegram, telephone, fax, BBS, email (and reply to all), forums, IRC, IM etc. It's all a continuing evolution of ways to communicate over longer distances and with more and more people. Distance has been irrelevant to one degree or another for a long time but it is the increasing ease with which we negate that distance that we are now looking at. - Colin Walker from fftogo

commented in the blog, dude, good work... - Sabrina