ALL content is now local
Three seemingly unrelated items coincided for me in recent days to hammer home the rapidity of change we are now witness to. The current quick-step rate of transition reminds me of what we about eight years ago referred to as "Internet time"; as in, "My, those start-ups are producing new online stores for pet food in Internet time." I suppose we should refer to the current milieu as paced in "Web 2.0 time."
My latest hint that something more than just buzz is going on occurred today when I was among a group of 37 other citizens of Belknap County, New Hampshire, awaiting the jury selection process, as is our occasional duty. As a chill northwest breeze rustled brightly colored leaves across the old glass panes of the 1887 courthouse in Laconia, the judge offered his usual set of instructions.
In addition to being asked not to read or listen to any media reports of the trial, or accounts of the previous related events that lead to the trial, the middle-aged and courtly judge admonished us all also not to blog on what we were witness to. That's right, all you bloggers in the randomly picked group of anyone over 18 from several mostly small towns in very middle-class northern New England, no blogging on the trial until after the verdict.
No one batted an eye-lash. Okay, judge, no problem, we'll wait, the nonchalantly and slightly shrugged shoulders seemed to say.
Friends, blogging -- and the inevitable rise of micro-media long-tail publishing it fuels -- is deeply now upon us, across the nitty-gritty of daily run-of-the-mill life just about everywhere. And it has happened extremely quickly. And it has significant ramifications for how we all communicate.
Hint number 2: What struck me more than any other part of last week's Apple announcement on the video-enabled iPods and video-purchasing enhanced iTunes 6.0 was how the things are priced. Darned if the newfangled video capabilities don't come at exactly the same cost as the similarly endowed non-video ones.
So when I go to replace my current iPod, or the truck driver who lives down the street buys his, we will no doubt opt for the full monty. Hell, yes, give me the one with the full-color video, it's the same price as the others.
This neat pricing trick will push these equivalents of multimedia razors very rapidly into the mainstream. And then the $1.99 blades will begin to flow, and the same effect that blogging has had on print communications will rapidly -- in Web 2.0 time -- extend to the distribution and creation of video clips of all sorts. In a year, the Belknap County judges will be sternly warning jurors, "And no video iPods or movie-making in the courtroom!"
Lastly, the iPod-enabled content diaspora has recently gone legacy, yep backward compatible to all the data goodies on your corporate network. Slurping allows those so inclined to convert any 60GB-iPod into an external storage device that can rapidly suck up scads of content from the sieves we call local area networks. I was alerted to slurping by Brant Hubbard, general manager at Centennial Software, where they have some interesting ideas on how to lock-down data from such innovations as slurping.
The point is that, borrowing a page from my first and favorite Congressman, Tip O'Neill, ALL content is local. And you can also now easily distribute it to the world for a song in Web 2.0 time.