Search in Social Media

What is Social Search as opposed to Social Media?  Social Search in Media?  Search in Social Media?

Next week, Gene Golovchinsky and I are moderating a pair of panels at the SSM workshop.  So we spent some time this week asking ourselves these definitional questions in preparation for the panel.  We came up with a lightweight taxonomy, and have done a few classifications/examples of existing systems into that taxonomy.  Whether or not you are one of the 80 participants in the workshop, I would invite you to take a look at our framework and comment or critique where necessary.  Here’s the link to Gene’s writeup:

We think the phrase ’search in social media’ has been used to refer to both the information being searched, and to the process for doing so. The information is standard user-generated content — tweets, blog posts, comment threads, tags, etc. The process, however, seems less well understood…It will be interesting to see how these ideas will be transformed by the discussion at the workshop. In any case, having a language with which to talk about phenomena is a prerequisite to articulating a research agenda, particularly in a young and multi-disciplinary field.

Please note, however, that one topic that will probably not be covered is the difference between social search (process) and collaborative search (process).  The latter workshop will be held a few days later at CSCW.  For an interesting thread on the distinction between the two, please see another FXPAL post from March of last year.