David Leblond

The Web: Putting the Power Of Publishing Into the Hands of Everyone

I have noticed over the last few weeks a phenomenon that excites me. When the internet started to mature, it gave the average joe a soapbox. This begat what is now known as the “blog.” You know, that thing that you are reading now? Ok, good we’re on the same page.

The way you could tell that blogging was seriously starting to take off was when the “news media” stepped in to warn us that “bloggers aren’t journalists.” The “journalists” of course lived in their own separate world where “news media” wasn’t a naughty word. So in many places, such as the tech industry blogging became the new news media.

But I don’t want to talk about blogging. That phenomenon arrived long ago and is now in our everyday language. No what is exciting me is how the web is bringing print, audio, and visual publishing to everyday folk.

Printing on demand was on the lips of the common technophile a long time ago. The idea was to basically goto a bookstore, buy a book, and have it printed for you on the fly. This was the answer to saving trees. Unfortunately it never caught on. However companies like Lulu saw this as an opportunity to bring the dream of being published to the everyday author who might normally never see his or her book in print. You send them the manuscript, people buy it, and Lulu prints it and ships it. The author doesn’t even pay to have it published. Not a dime.

Podcasting was developed to have scheduled audio feeds delivered to your computer so you could listen to them on your MP3 player. Like blogs, it was dismissed as a fad most remarkably by Steve Jobs of Apple who called it “the Wayne’s World of radio.” However he did an about face when he saw the amount of podcasts being developed and threw the feature into iTunes 4.9. Podcast is quickly starting to become as common a term as blog. More and more people are tuning in, giving opinions and more importantly independant music a new forum. Radio is dead, people. I forsee wireless internet beaming podcasts into our cars. It’s the new FM.

And now we look at the last piece of the media pie: television. Lets think about TV for a moment, shall we? Most of us watch TV. I know when I think about what day it is, most of the times my next question is “what comes on tonight?” The digital video recorder has helped us overcome the requirement to watch TV at a certain time or watch commercials. But that is only slightly better than the old VCRs. The future? IPTV. Time Warner, watch your ass.

I’ve plugged Lulu (although I have not yet used them) but now I’d like to plug some podcasts I listen to:
Nightsound radio (feed)
This Week In Tech (feed)
Diggnation (feed)

And an IPTV show:
Digital Life TV