New Internet tools and technologies are definitely a mixed blessing for many small businesses. On the one hand, they represent opportunities for innovation and getting ahead of the pack; on the other hand, they can easily become merely another thing that causes anxiety because you know you should be up to speed but you don't have the time and resources to pay sufficient attention.

I have to admit that this is the case even for NewWest.Net, which as an online media company owes its very existence to Internet innovation. For us at least there's no better example of the challenges and opportunities than Twitter—and this week we had our first dramatic example of how powerful this service can be and of how even the smallest companies can readily get in the flow.

Twitter, as you probably know, is a service that enables people to share very short messages in real time. When it first came along 18 months or so ago, I wasn't very enamored. Given e-mail, instant messaging, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, text messaging, the good-old telephone, and the interactive nature of NewWest.Net itself, I didn't feel that a new means of communication was very high on my list of needs.

On top of that, Twitter, like Facebook, seemed geared mainly to a mode of socializing that just isn't me. I've got as much ego as the next guy, but I still don't think many people really care what I happen to be doing right at the moment (and a lot of the time I wouldn't be inclined to share it, anyway).

As a new-media company, though, we can't exactly ignore new forms of media, so we reluctantly tiptoed in, setting up a New West Twitter account as well as our own personal Twitter accounts. Fortunately, our relatively new webmaster was a huge Twitter fan, and while I can't say we'd figured out what it meant for us, we at least started to get over our fear.

Then, last Thursday a little after 8:00 a.m., a huge explosion leveled half a block in downtown Bozeman, a small Montana city that's home to one of NewWest.Net's local sites. Twitter, remarkably, emerged as the place for eyewitness accounts, photo sharing, and the latest chatter on what exactly was going on.