Being an expert in social media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.

But one aspect of this story may help elucidate [Sean] Parker’s subsequent attitudes toward rebellion. He performed his court-ordered duties at a library with other teenage offenders. There he met a girl whom he describes as a “punk-rock princess.” One day she wrote her phone number on Parker’s hand—in ballpoint pen, he remembers fondly—and a few months later, he says, “I lost my virginity to her.” He explains: “I thought it was an incredible cosmic irony. This was the most romantic experience of my life and I met her because I’d been raided by the F.B.I.

I stumbled across this historical fact while reading Thomas C. Leonard’s 1995 book, News for All: America’s Coming-of-Age With the Press. He writes, “When Americans chose the news, they were often not simply thinking of stories they wished to read; they were thinking of another reader.”

Leonard’s example is the Boston News-Letter, first published in 1704. Its proprietor, John Campbell, deliberately left blank space in its pages so subscribers could annotate and otherwise append their ideas and “news” to the newspaper. These amendments weren’t aimless jottings, either. Newspapers were routinely shared after purchase, and the notes readers added in the spaces and margins were designed to edify the friend or acquaintance the reader next forwarded his paper to.

The kind of application that Google knows how to make well are the kind that embody a panda’s “eats, shoots, and leaves” model of Internet behavior. Pandas spend every waking hour foraging — aka searching — and consuming. The most successful Google applications serve such a utilitarian mandate, too: they encourage users to search for something, consume, and move onto the next thing. Get in, do your business, get out. Do a Google search, slurp down information, move on. Pull up Google maps or Gmail or Google news, do something, leave. Where Google does not excel is in making applications that are by their nature for lingering and luxuriating — the so-called social applications.

While all referral traffic is up 120% year over year, Salon social media traffic is up by a whopping 720%. Experts say referral traffic (from search engines, social media sites, and third-party sites) is the key to overall audience growth, but that it can be tricky to attract because it is directly dependent on site content.

If the content is meaningful and well written, others will link to it.