I'm not going to waste my time watching mindless youtube videos or reading 'what have I eaten/crapped today' on twitter or facebook.
I can still appreciate proffesional media, but I hate getting it in bulk from some big company and paying for all kinds of things I don't care a bit.
The media is dead, long live the media. We now have more media, in more formats, in more times of the day and night, from more people, than at any other time in history. And we will get even more in 2010.
The many different forms of media will continue to flourish and splinter and to compete with each other in 2010, only at a far greater scale. This is made possible because of ther availability of very powerful and inexpensive self-publishing tools and services (this is the single most important defining trend of the past decade, imho):
- Blogging software helped make self-publishing easy. Movable Type was a breakthrough product in the early 2000s, the ‘Pagemaker’ of its day. But you had to know how to install it and configure it. These days there are multitudes of hosted blogging publishing platforms that make everything simple. Posterous, for example, allows you to blog by simply sending an email to your account.
- Twitter makes self-publishing even easier, using the simple text message format to send a short post.
- Facebook and other social networks are set up to make self-publishing tremendously simple. Facebook, for example, automatically creates a news feed based on what you did: Tom uploaded some photos, Tom is going to Jill’s party… all without having to actually write anything. Same with Friendfeed.
- YouTube and other video sites enable quick video publishing by handling the tricky video conversion and posting.
- Easy video cameras help produce more video. Cisco is heavily promoting its Flip cameras, I’m sure you’ve seen the ads. There’s going to be tons more video generated and posted online.
Very importantly, we have traversed the cultural change that questioned whether we needed these tools, whether blogging or Twitter or Facebook or YouTube really mattered, or have a future. We’ve moved on.
We’re now entering the full-blown creation and publishing phase. It’s not just a relatively small group of early adopters that used and evangelized these tools and services, it is now moving mainstream. It is now involving millions, tens of millions, and soon hundreds of millions of people.
We have all the elements in place for a media Tsunami. A giant wave of media of all types will wash over us.
And it won’t be all dross — there will be a huge amount of great media, great blog posts, great Tweets, great videos, great discussions, great music.
What will this mean?
This Tsunami will wash away at the value of all media. By value I mean the monetary value.
If you are trying to make a living as a media professional it’s going to be even tougher this year.
Welcome to 2010 and a decade that will be defined by its media and will redefine media — time and again.
