Social Software

Jon Udell's definition from the InfoWorld article, "The Social Enterprise".

Social software can be defined as whatever supports our actual human interaction as we colonize the virtual realm. The category includes familiar things such as groupware and knowledge management, and extends to the new breed of relationship power tools.

Weblogs

Tim Jarrett's definition while at BloggerCon.

Blogs are personally published documents on the web, with attribution and date, collected in a single place, generally published with a static structure to facilitate incoming links from other sources, and updated with some regularity and frequency from every few days to several times daily. Blogs are generally understood to be subjective, with no authority other than that lent by their author generally. Many blogs consist of links and commentary—comments about something or some entity with a web presence, links to enable the reader to discover the original object being commented on and explore it for themselves. Bloggers leave link trails, hyperlinks back to the subjects of their commentary, and the link trails enable others to go beyond the blogger’s subjective opinion and find the original source so that they can evaluate it and form their own opinions.

Blogging thus differs from general web pages in frequency, intent and practice. Rather than claiming authority, blogs assume subjectivity and let the reader make up his own mind. Rather than a collection of documents that define an object on the Internet—for instance, a company, a university, a person’s family tree—blogs are glosses on those objects, marginal annotations that unlike other forms of web comments such as the “sticky note” feature in IE have permanence of their own on the Web. Unlike a threaded discussion group (web board or Usenet), where there are generally no authoritative methods to find a prior message and no central record of a person’s contributions and opinions, blogs host the author’s comments in a single place, at a personal address, and in a chronology so that others can review the blogger’s thoughts and comments in one location. By keeping a permanent record of the blogger’s writings in a central place, a blog implies a certain amount of accountability for the author’s words and opinions; in other online communities, this accountability is generally left up to the community to enforce.

RSS

For my purposes, RSS (Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, etc.) is an XML format for displaying metadata that can be interchanged between computer systems.