My Own Pirate Radio

I’m fond of saying the cost of publishing is going to zero. Moving forward I’m revising this to, “publishing is free”. There are so many free publishing services out there now that it’s hard to imagine newcomers charging fees.

Here’s one a colleague just told me about: Lulu.com lets you publish books, CDs, brochures etc. for free. From their FAQ: “You can publish your work for free […] When someone wants to buy your content, Lulu handles the transaction and pays you the royalty you specified. Lulu takes a small commission when someone else buys your content.” There are many more out there like Lulu.

Let’s roll the clock forward a few years on these trends:

• The number of publishing tools/services continues to grow quickly. Some tools vendors will get acquired and consolidated into bigger publishing bundles. New media publishing brands will emerge.
• People’s basic nature won’t change: we’ll still love to talk, and socialize, and share. So everyone will become a publisher, be it for-profit or not-for-profit. Photos, blogs, music, books, audio, video, opinions, votes. Metadata too: bookmarks, playlists, and so on.
• Metadata and associated statistics will become every bit as interesting and necessary and useful as the data itself. Metadata will increasingly help us discover content (like photos, and bookmarks). And companies will increasingly try to monetize metadata.
• Given these growth drivers, the amount of content available will increase at a super-linear rate for the forseeable future. Each person will publish more information, on average, tomorrow than today, because it will become incrementally easier, safer, more fun, more useful, and more hip, every day.
• Privacy concerns will force some content to be published in secure ways, e.g. to circles of friends. Tools need to support this.
• Conventional publishers will have to produce higher quality content, find defensible market niches, and evolve their technologies and business models. Those who don’t will fade away. (No news here.)
• Most of the content produced will continue to be low quality, from a professional content production standpoint. My wish is that this won’t matter as much as it did in the past; I’m hoping we trend towards a “content democracy” and away from “content elitism”. That wish depends on the next point though.
• Tools for discovering the content you like will have to improve dramatically. It may actually become more difficult for a while to find the stuff you like, if content growth outpaces discovery capabilities in the near term. As discovery tools improve, however, publishers will find it easier to matchmake niche content with niche audiences around the world. Content that was too obscure to survive in the past will have more opportunity for exposure (more oxygen).

What exciting times we live in. One could certainly choose to view all this with a pessimistic eye, but overall I feel good about it. More ideas, more oxygen in every niche, and in due course, a higher signal-to-noise ratio. Provided we can avoid drowning in babble (pun intended) — and I think we can — these trends are positive for society.