Social media includes websites where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are hosted via websites through user submission. Typically, these websites include mechanisms to allow users to vote on content which makes items submitted by users more or less "popular".

Social media is also defined as the democratization of information. The 'social media revolution' allows citizens to change from simply being content readers to publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers*.

Social media and social networking sites use the "wisdom of crowds” to let users collaborate when developing silos of information on the web. Social media websites come in many flavors, including audio, forums, ecommerce, text-based sites, message boards, weblogs, wikis, virtual worlds, podcasts, pictures, and video. Technologies behind social media and social networking sites include blogs, photo-sharing, video blogs, wall-postings, email, sms, instant messaging, music-sharing, and group creation.

In addition to social media, social networks are an important part of the online landscape. These sites focus on building communities of people who have similar interests and activities. Social Networking sites allow users to connect with each other and interact with different technologies such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, and discussion groups.

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(*wikipedia)