Tag: definitions

DDAT or D:DDAT?

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

Just a quick post on a rather semantical topic!

The phrase DDAT – standing for digital, design and technology – has become a commonly adopted bit of industry jargon in government circles, to describe the work that people do in this thing we call digital.

However, I find it just doesn’t quite work for me, and I think it is because of the use of the word digital within it. I think in the definition, digital is meant to cover things like user centredness, service design, digital culture and so on – but this isn’t terribly clear.

So, I have found myself on occasion instead referring to digital: design, data and technology. I’ve never abbreviated it, but I suppose that if I did it would be D:DDAT.

For me, D:DDAT gets across the idea that ‘digital’ encompasses the use of design, data and technology rather than being separate from the latter two.

This hardly matters in the grand scheme of things, but I thought it worth sharing! 🤷‍♂️

Defining social media & web2.0

Defining Social Media & Web2.0

The diagram (click it for a readable version) above is one I put together a while ago to try and explain what I think the terms social media and web2.0 actually mean, and how the two relate to one another. They are often used interchangably, but I don’t think that it necessarily is the case that they are synonymous.

Social media for me is media made social. That might be obvious, but you have to think what you mean by media. Text is media, photos are media, video is media. Maybe a web bookmarkcan be media, and a presentation file too. How we make that media social is by making it commentable, sharable, editable, embdeddable. By allowing others to interact with the media, we have made it social.

Web2.0, for me, is the means by which we make our media social. The blog make text social, as do wikis. Flickr makes photos social, YouTube does the same for video, and so on. The infrastructure used to enable this is stuff like tagging, RSS, AJAX, mashups and widgets.

I think just about every web2.0 service can be described in this way: Google Docs is word processing and spreadsheets made social, for example. The interesting bit is when it all works well, and that’s the ovallybit in the middle of my diagram – enhanced communication and collaborative, which at its zenith becomes community.

How do you define web2.0 and social media? Does it fit in with mydiagram? Feel free to borrow it, edit it and reuse it.