Social software 101 or – the business essentials of Web 2.0

The last year has seen a great deal written and hyped about social software. There has been an implication that something new is happening, and that if you don’t know about it and harness it in your organization, you face redundancy and ruin. Well perhaps not ruin, but at least seemingly to be seriously behind the times, which in the technology news area is about as bad as it gets.

So what is social software and why should you care? Over the next few days I will look at the main categories and some examples of each, both at the introductory level and taking a business focused perspective, the ‘what is it good for’ approach.
Please make comments, ask questions, and let me know if these are adding enough detail. If possible add interesting examples of your own usage of social software.

Social software is not new. When email was first run on the networks that would become the internet, ARPANET (in about 1970), it was considered a minor feature, yet in the concluding report on ARPANET usage the massive use of email was the “largest single surprise!”

What is new, are the rapidly increasing range of tools for finding, storing and sharing experience using the internet. It is this range that I will consider in this series of primers.