When you hear about “social networking,” just know that computing is getting more personal, more about you, your success, your family, your interests and the ability to connect with people and information that can help you. Social networking is people talking… about everything under the sun and much more.

A social network can help you learn. It can help you find what you enjoy. Debate issues. Explore cures. Give aide. Get assistance. Mentor. Buy, sell or trade. The verbs that can be applied to social networks are exploding as technology expands possibilities.

Welcome to LenovoSocial. This is Lenovo’s contribution to the potluck , our infinite potato salad, if you will, for the banquet that is the Internet, to help our customers and friends put their laptops and network connections to use in the rapidly evolving social world spreading across the globe over wires, fiber-optic cables and wireless broadband connections.

Social networks connect people, not just information. They power interaction instead of delivering information, giving participants the opportunity to do almost anything they would in a physical community via the Internet. Think of it this way: When the Internet was full of sites you visited, it was like reading a magazine or vast book, a television network with an infinite programming schedule, but all you did was watch, read or consume information. Social networks build on the power of the individual to speak through the Internet, changing audiences into authors, leaders, helpers, editors, fact-checkers, businesspeople instead of simple customers. The social is everything people do; social networks are growing up to give you, to give anyone with a network-connected computer the same potential power as the local politician, the business leader, the publisher, the organizer, the fund-raiser, the media and the community.

LenovoSocial will grow and change, because that’s what societies do. We promise, though, that it will always be about helping you get more from the computer you purchased and the networks to which you connect.

In the coming months, we’ll be introducing you to social networking in articles and how-to primers, as well as creating a community that connects you to other people who are learning the tricks and power of social networking. The LenovoSocial community will help you discover social networks, review and share the networks you find most useful in order to bring more members to your communities, and, with a little luck and the help of other technology leaders, a new breed of computing experience that shapes itself to you, so you have the ultimate system “just for me.” It’s all about delivering more of the power in the laptop you’re using right now, to you after the box is open and thrown out, beyond being available to provide technical service—LenovoSocial is our commitment to helping you get the most from a networked PC.

First, let’s look at the varieties of social networking, in order to orient you to this new land. Social networking actually includes many capabilities you’ve probably heard of and use, such as blogs, RSS feeds, comment threads, and photo sharing. Social networks can be small focused communities and they can be broken into parts and “mashed up” to give you a uniquely personal view of the world, the information that matters to you, and what you need to know and who you need to connect with in order to accomplish your goals.

Social networks can also be all-encompassing web sites unto themselves that offer instant messaging, blogging, photo sharing, friend-lists and alerts. Facebook and MySpace represent these destination networks, where they have millions or hundreds of millions of visitors a day.

Blogs started this transformation of the web, allowing people to keep and publish personal journals that have become private communities and public journalistic efforts. A blog is, for all intents and purposes, a reverse-chronologically published series of entries, called “posts,” that can include comments from readers. Over the decade blogs have been around, software has appeared to add all sorts of features, such as photo-sharing widgets, instant messaging, and tools for interconnecting conversations on different blogs. At the heard of every big social network is a personal blogging tool for individual members.

RSS feeds, which are automated streams of news and data generated by a web site or blog, let people subscribe to a site and get articles or excerpts of articles on their desktop in a “reader” application or web site. Google Reader, for example, is an online RSS reader that you can use for free to assemble a personalized view of the news, your friends’ blogs and much more. RSS feeds have also become the foundation of data sharing between people and applications, so that it is possible to coordinate calendars, get directions and track stock performance automatically with a few clicks of a button.

Comments are the heart and soul of the social networking world. You’ve probably seen comments appearing on news stories published by online news sites and in blogs. They are the “talk back” feature that made publishing into a two-way street. You see, most people are ready with an opinion even if they don’t publish a newspaper or a blog of their own. Comment threads, the strings of topic-specific discussions that spring up around articles and postings, are where much of the give-and-take of social networking takes place. Moreover, comments became the foundation of many social sites dedicated to specific topics, such as healthcare issues and politics, where communities have grown out of the publishing of a few writers. Sites that review products, from books to cars, exist as comment threads organized by title or car model—the conversation is what brings people to the site.

The last “founding feature” of social networking came in the form of photo-sharing, which is the basis for all the sharing sites that have appeared as companies provided free online storage space for media files and other data that used to be kept in paper or on people’s hard drive where it was hard to share. After photo-sharing, video and audio was quick to follow and, with RSS feeds, became the phenomena known as “podcasting.” But today we share much more through these sites, including calendars, the music we listen to, word processing documents, spreadsheets and email, to name but a few, so that software can sort through what we share to identify opportunities to collaborate, to learn and to do business. Shared files are the basis of thousands of services we have yet to see, yet are certain to emerge as programmers figure out how to analyze the data to create community.

Now we’ve covered the key features that led to the rise of social networking, you’ve got all the basics you need to know to start to explore this new networked world.

There’s one more idea that adds incredible richness to the social scene, the idea of the “mash-up.” It’s just this: All the parts of a social site should be easy to mix and match within many sites, not just one site, so that people can create their own mashed-up view of their world by combining what they share on different sites in unique combinations. In practice, that means you might post something about dealing with shoulder pain on your blog and it would appear automagically in a site about shoulder pain generally, and comments made at that other site would also appear on your own blog.

Mash-ups give your data freedom it never had when it sat on your own hard drive. That’s both a blessing and a curse, as anyone whose embarrassing Saturday night photos appear at work on Monday morning, yet, when used wisely, mash-up technology lets the network begin to approximate the complex interactions we’re used to in the human world. Part of our job here at LenovoSocial is to make sure you’re armed with the knowledge that makes the social mash-up system work for you.

The social is large sites, such as Facebook, and as small as your own blog. How to go about mixing them appropriately to your needs, your children’s and your business needs are just a few of the questions Internet users will face as they dive into this emerging world of interpersonal communication. Welcome to LenovoSocial, your community for growing a positive social experience on the Net.