Traditional vs Social Media

I Started thinking today about the differences between traditional online media, such as newspapers, newsletters, research sites, etc... and social media, such as blogs, twitter, instant message, etc... How can these be intertwined and should they be?

I guess we need to figure out the definition of traditional media and social media. It doesn't really matter if my definition matches with the rest of the world, but it needs to be something that I can work with in my blog (this is one of the joys of being a mathematician, I can define things as I like it and not worry about the rest of the world).

Definitions:

• Traditional Media: Let us define tradition media as sites that come from traditional paper sources, such as newspapers, newsletters, magazines, research sites (such as professional sites developed for legal, scientific, monetary, scholarly, etc... research).
• Social Media: Anything that is generated from the public at large, such as blogs, twitter, IM, websites, etc... It doesn't have to be something done by an amateur, since there are professional bloggers or people who blog since their jobs require it.
• Gray Areas: There are gray areas, there are "blogs" that are written on news sites by the anchors or other writers, I'm assuming that in these blogs they can express their opinion (subjective), instead of the news (objective). I can't use objective to describe traditional media, since it could be material that has been written subjectively.

Merger

Can the two forms of media merge? You betcha! It's already happening with traditional media, they are pulling in postings from users, taking live polls, publishing blogs, etc... all without the editorial over site that happens with their primary means of communication. Could this mean that we'll end up getting our news via our phones and twitter, possibly.

The bigger question to me is that can we apply some of the methods that are used in tradition media to apply structure to social media? I believe that this could happen on a level, but not without people providing labels for this post. These labels are essentially meta-data that is attached to the blog, this meta-data can be used for structure, it could be used to build your own personal taxonomy (hmm, I think I'll add that to my labels, taxonomy is just one of those words I think are cool). How can we apply meta-data to twitter? Some is inherent (date/time), can we also get location from the phone's GPS (do we want to).

Answers

I'm not really looking for answers to this, but I'm actually pondering more than not.