Emerging Technologies

Birth of pubmunication tools

By Brij ⋅ August 3, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

This whole distinction between publishing tool and communication tool has been bugging me for quite some time. More when I started drawing boundaries to understand more about conversational marketing.

Scott Karp has a great post on Twitter. He thinks Twitter is a publishing tool:

That’s not to say there isn’t a strong communication element to it,
just like there is in the comment sections of blogs (on the occasions
when commenter actually address each other’s comments). But the
communication that occurs on Twitter combines with all of the other
information that passes through Twitter to create what at times is a
mesmerizing, often addicting publication.

Ever since I started following twitter I have been thinking about where in our conventional category does this tool fit in. It doesn’t.

Its wrong to put Twitter in either of the two categories as our expectation and relationship towards publishing tools has dramatically changed in last couple of years. Publishing done in a shared social space becomes communication. At the same time communication channels over open shared space eventually acquires publishing platform characteristics.

I will go ahead and coin my own word to resolve this categorization dilemma. Word is pubmunication. Twitter is a pubmunication tool (it does have a funny sound though).

Pubmunication tools are those tools which will be hard to explain with just one of their characteristic. Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc are all pubmunication tools in the sense they combine both communication and publishing characteristics.

This is a very late night rambling but I need to think some more on this theme.