Building blocks are enabling our future…

Whatever you call this next phase of the internet (Web 2.0; Blah, blah, blah “Live”) there’s one thing that is crystal clear: business as usual is over. We’re accelerating in to an era that will leverage the always-on internet, the collective consciousness of the humans that are connected through it, and the enabling technologies and web services’ offerings that companies are rushing to get in to the marketplace.

The internet-as-a-platform meme is becoming increasingly interesting and available to those that do NOT have deep pockets. From blogs, to photos (Flickr, Smugmug), to video (Brightcove, CurrenTV), to podcasting, to MySpaces, Facebook, Yahoo360 or MSN, more and more of what we want to consume, to share and to deliver-to-others is on the internet and the building blocks are either free or incredibly affordable.

When I started my blog last year and podcast this year, my objective was this, “My purpose with diving in to the blogosphere, becoming a podcaster and totally and completely immersing myself in Web 2.0 (the acceleration and momentum which is becoming palpable) is to figure it out, be in-the-game and gain an intuitive understanding of what’s happening as the collective consciousness of mankind gets connected. The only way to understand it is to live it and what’s happening right now is the most fundamental shift I’ll see in my lifetime.” Video is *really* hard to do well so I’ve not yet leveraged my years of video ability since there is little payoff for the effort…yet.

That said, the *real* reason that I (and millions of others) can do all this stuff is due to the critical mass that’s been achieved with enabling technologies. The accessibility of digital cameras/camcorders, audio recorders, and tools on the computer to manipulate and deliver content to the myriad of web service hosted offerings are just waiting for us to use ’em — and use them we are. The more we leverage these building blocks and deliver increasingly relevant and interesting content that will be available to anyone, anywhere….the more we’ll drive increasing amounts of our attention from traditional media to the internet.

Man…I’d hate to be working for a newspaper, radio/TV station or book publisher, just knowing that my industry and business can’t help but be disintermediated at some point in the not-too-distant future.