There is an old saying, which goes something like "The more things change, the more they stay the same". In witnessing the very rapid change shaping media industries, despite their best efforts to resist, that adage does not seem to be true here.
There doesn't seem to be any real question about the next wave of consumption and publishing, because it is upon us and it is mobile. It may actually be time for pundits to start looking for something else to point to, the certainty of the mobile revolution being so firmly established.
One of the distinct features of this new relationship between people and technology that makes it particularly interesting is not, to me, the consumption side of the equation. Similar to the original concept of the web, mobile today is as much about publishing as it is about paying attention to work created by others. This thing called "social" in broad terms, seems to just be a way of describing the two way relationship between people as it was in the early days of the web. At the time, the easy access to html source and the wide open nature of things brought a freedom to create and publish web pages that did not exist previously.
Somewhere along the way, things have gotten a bit distorted. I recall my first good internet connection at home being an ISDN line. It came with one public IP address. It had as much upstream bandwidth as downstream, and it seemed completely normal to run a web server on one of the machines in my home office. That isn't really very feasible or advisable in today's world. As the web has rather unfortunately evolved into an asymmetric network, as well as a significant playground for "bad guys", the prudent path has been to push everything up to a server. In general terms, that seems to be the main thing that breathed so much life into Web 2.0. The ability to easily publish things to a server and not have to worry about bandwidth issues and daily security concerns enabled a lot more people to harness the publishing power of the internet.
We are now at the nexus of some important things, and this toolkit from smallpicture is doing a lot of things right to enable the next round of an explosion in publishing.
Mobile publishing (a.k.a. social)
Ubiquitous javascript execution engines
Cloud APIs
What are commonly called "social applications" are exciting to people because they are able to publish, as well as consume, information which matters to them as individuals. With the tremendous growth in internet capable mobile devices and the beginnings of decent ease of use that we see today, individuals are creating things at a breathtaking pace. I'm not talking about devs pumping out applications, but everyone I know being able to send snippets of info, and pictures and video to the web without a second thought. Friction free publishing is here, and it's quite often mobile.
As various platforms have tussled for a long time to be the dominant target for application developers, one striking thing happened with widespread adoption of html. The smart money figured out pretty quickly "don't bet against the open web". This one seems pretty clear from where we sit now. Html, css and javascript are the tools of the trade. Cross-platform application development has always been hard, verging on wicked complexity. Now it's not. Javascript apps can be executed by any platform that matters.
There is a lot to "the cloud" and it's a term that means a lot of different things to different people. There are various huge walled gardens in operation, and a lot of other services that are a bit more special purpose "XaaS" platforms (and a bunch of other stuff too) all mixed up in an enormous machine that is sometimes called "the" cloud, or more simply just the internet. There is a looming issue that really hasn't been dealt with yet, and it is all about data storage for individuals. I'm sure that most people don't completely understand it yet, and it seems a bit confusing for a lot of people (or just not that important). Whether it's VRM or dropbox or iphone encryption, people are increasingly realizing the need to have more direct control over the data they create, publish and care about. People need this degree of control over their data, and they want it, although they for the most part are not aware of either of these things. They can have what they need and want, however, just by making wise choices. This stuff exists.
The thing we are looking at here is targeted at all of these important facets of publishing and personal data. I'm pretty excited about a future where the kind of interoperation and openness behind Fargo and River4 are widespread.
There are lots of vested interests which inevitably fight against the open web. The builders of walled gardens and silos definitely don't do the open web any favors. Old guard journalism institutions also seem to want to have this tendency, although Jeff Jarvis does give me hope that this has been going on long enough and obviously enough that they might be coming around to embracing the open web. We'll see.
The thing is, the news system of the future is being built. The question is how involved they want to be in that future.
Photo credit: sazbean See, that's how it's done on the open web. Wasn't even hard.