A tip off from Amazon.com led me to order a new book from the UK website, based purely on the title and a very brief synopsis. So when it arrived, not really sure what I was going to get, I was intrigued by The Social Media Handbook.
It's a large book, just over 500 pages and larger than A4 - more like a musical score in size, or one of those popular "games that trainers play" volumes. Flicking through the book I saw pages and pages of footnotes and references and some interesting "font" discrepancies in places, alongside a variety of graphics in different "house styles". Was this the result of a student project? Then I studied the preface and rear cover and realised this was a true collaborative effort. To quote directly from the text:
Topic relevant selected content from the highest rated Wiki entries, typeset, printed and shipped, combine the advantages of up-to-date and in-depth knowledge with the convenience of printed books.
So the many short and easy to follow chapters, with their frequent references and links to related sources of information, are in fact pieces of content from other digital sources, interpreted and assimilated into a paperback book.
The "handbook" is really a digest of a wide variety of social media tools. Starting with a series of "articles", the contributors discuss the main themes of social media from "user generated content" through to blogging, wikis and "crowdsourcing", which was a new on on me.
The following sections highlight some of the most popular and not so well known tools in the categories of Communication, Collaboration and Multimedia, Reviews and Opinions and Entertainment. For each tool, there is a summary table, followed by what can only be described as Wikipedia-like narrative.
You get quick tours and background information to tools such as Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress; Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; and Ning, Plaxo and Meetup.com. You can read up on Wikipedia, Wetpaint and Delicious and learn more about Google Reader and Digg. Flickr, YouTube and last.fm are also featured, along with Epinions and Yahoo! Answers. Finally, you can look further into Second Life, The Sims Online and Forterra Systems.
If you're researching social media and their use for learning and development, then this is probably a good starting point. The contributors have certainly done a lot of the groundwork for you.
