First, a little background reading:
Dating niches a la Corante
The Long Tail of Tags from Alex Barnett
Some earlier questions on The Long Tail and community
These themes keep on popping up — niche vs the whole; individual vs group. When I talked with Nancy White over the weekend, we also discussed this seeming trend in tech away from the group notion of community to a community of individual. Perhaps this notion of vs. is a bit dramatic, however there does seem to be a gradual shift in the emphasis and energy of where all the community hype is nowadays.
From a pure knowledge sharing standpoint, finding your niche(s) is a wonderful thing. Not only do you find information from others, but you are afforded an opportunity to then engage, interact, share, and perhaps even care about others in that particular niche.
Beyond the knowledge sharing bit though, I have questions about how this all plays out on a day to day basis. Given that we do not live in a vaccuum, how do all of the niches interact with one another? Are there enough people who belong to multiple niches to help serve as a bridge builder? A guide? Maybe even a translator? To what extent is there interaction between niches? To what extent is there friction, or even a complete disconnect between niches? Whether it’s on a discussion forum, or in politics, we see what happens when tight knit groups disagree with another tight knit group.
Abraham Lincoln once said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Are the niches and the search for community via individualistic means driving us all further apart?
pieces of me...running 