Communication Tools Have Become "Communiniches"

The rise of Twitter has bloggers doing more than the usual amount of navel gazing.

"Is blogging dead?," many wonder.

The online trend-setting Jason Calacanis probably did as much as anyone to get this ball rolling when he announced his retirement as a blogger back in July. Others, if not exactly calling it quits, have noticed a dip in their blogging productivity.

Regular readers of The TrueTalk Blog will undoubtedly have noticed a (blessedly welcome?) decrease in the frequency and verbosity of my posts. Mostly, that's been due to my intense focus on VloggerHeads over the past five months. But, Twitter has also had an impact.

So, does Twitter threaten blogging? Not in my view.

Every communication tool ever developed has supplemented, not replaced, the ones that existed prior to its appearance. Snail mail? Going strong. Telephones? Still here. Fax machines? Oh yeah. Printed books? Billions sold.

Why? Because each tool is well-suited to do one thing—something—better than any other. And that something can be thought of as that tool's communication niche, or "communiniche." 

The novel continues to be the best method for in-depth exploration of the interior lives of characters.

Twitter is a great way to quickly capture a moment. But it sucks at capturing nuance.

Try to imagine trying to write War and Peace in smoke signals.

The key is finding the right tool for the right niche.

Take video. Today, for example, we have 12Seconds, Seesmic, VloggerHeads and YouTube. All four of these services provide an outlet for creating and uploading video material, but each is focused on a very different niche. While 12Seconds and Seesmic are geared toward top-of-the-head webcam uploads, and YouTube toward being the video repository for entertainment, VloggerHeads focuses on enabling engaging interaction around thought-through material.

So, 12Seconds/Seesmic:Twitter::VloggerHeads:Blogging.

Each has its place in the increasing niche-focused online world. The key is knowing which communication tool to use for which job.

Comments

[kenrg]

I've also blogged much less over 2008, for me the culprits are video (VloggerHeads and YouTube, but also 12seconds, tripfilms, etc.) and that darn real world work thing.

I do use Twitter, but for me it's more of an aggregator - a place to post a quick update, either about "real life" or pointing to a video, blog, or other on a different site. In that way, Twitter is a useful tool for me.

For real communication, I can only pray that some day I can achieve that level of brevity and still make a worthwhile point.

[Aldon Hynes]

I'm pretty active on Twitter, and spend some time on some similar sites. I'm not on Vloggerheads. I just signed up, but haven't seen what it really adds for me.

Yet I continue to blog a lot. Perhaps even more than I did in previous years, as I get more and more ideas from Twitter and other social media.