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Social Web vs. Social Media

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Submitted by Andre Yap on 2010, July 23 - 7:45am
Thanks to Jack Nork, who excerpted my Google Groups email in his Posterous blog, we're able to capture this moment in time, in our collective consciousness:

Republished from Saturday, July 10, a few hours before Social Web Week CT kicked off 30 events in 7 days:

When it comes to us, I have stopped using THE, and instead refer to it as OUR social web: our connections, our conversations, our collaborations, our community, all the mighty things we're getting done in days that would have taken years. It's clear to me now that social media and technologies are only as good as what we, the community, do with them.

That's a world of difference. We understood it implicitly, in our gut, when we had that debate early on whether to call it Social Media Week vs. Social Web Week.

We made the right call, and if the difference is still abstract to others, we continue to demonstrate it in Our Social Web. Not just social media and technologies, but how we use them purposefully to build wholes far greater than the sum of our parts, as we've done in GoogleHaven, The Left to Right Movement, Social Web Week CT, PodcampCT, and now The New Haven Project: 100 Common Visions in 100 Days.