Social Networking, Social Media, Social Software

This guide will help you find information about:

• social networking sites
• social software such as Twitter, blogs, bookmarking, wikis
• privacy issues and settings

If you are just beginning to learn about social networking there are many resources where you can find out about and compare various social networking sites.

If you are researching social networking and social media for your course you will find links to resources, databases, videos, and much more.

Academic Search Complete is a good place to start your research for articles about social networking; Click through each item to get the resource or click on "View the Website" to see more articles.

When off campus, be sure to have your Student ID and Library PIN number ready to authenticate with the system identifying yourself as a user of TRU services.

Use the search box below to start searching for social networking, media, and software.

Beginner's Guide to Facebook

The content is intended for non-profit groups, but it's a good overview for anyone!

Classroom 2.0

Articles about teaching using the Web and a forum for social media topics.

Classroom 2.0 Beginner Group

Beginner Page for the above site.

Digizen - Digital Citizen

Good overview of social networking, if a bit dated!

​Frontline: Digital Nation: Distracted by Everything

Media Shift - Social Media

PBS guide to social media.

Online Social Networking On Campus

Inside Higher Education's look from the faculty/staff point of view.

Social Networking in Plain English

From the people at CommonCraft.

How Stuff Works: "How Online Social Networking Works"

Well-known site explaining complicated topics in a readable manner.

Social bookmarking, using websites like Diigo, is a free web service that allows faculty and students to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized web source. With emphasis on the power of the community, social bookmarking greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Social bookmarking sites are information management tools that allow you to:

• save a site's location
• categorize the site using tags
• enable easy searching and grouping of related content

Your bookmarks are saved online and accessible wherever you have Web access.

Using social bookmarks has distinct advantages:

• they can be public or private
• public bookmarks support the collective knowledge and information of others who are interested in topics you are researching or in which you have an interest
• you can learn how others save, sort, and tag bookmarks to be more efficient
• you will find suggested materials which have already been sorted bu other users
• RSS feeds to these accounts and you can be alerted to information you want to track 

Finding social software, social networking, or social media programs can be daunting.  Research in this quickly changing and evolving phenomena has many challenges. 

Be sure you evaluate and critically assess each site before you use it.

Become an efficient researcher using Google syntax, products, and tools.

The sites listed below will assist you when researching a topic in social networking on the Internet. 

Want to find the most substantial content on social networks sites?  Checkout these polcies posted at these most popular ones.

• Privacy - MySpace
• Ning: About: Privacy Policy
• Classmates - Privacy

Watch Diana Boyd present on the concerns and issues of privacy and the Internet.

Sites that provide information on the privacy issues related to online social networks.