Many are the forces at work at the crossroads between communication and new media technologies, and the changes taking place are truly sweeping the news, publishing and media industries in ways we could have hardly foreseen a few years ago.

One thing looks certain.

The individual is going to be the center of these new universes.

More and more, the skilled and capable individual will play an important role in
the way that news will be created, customized and consumed by others.

Individuals rather than large media conglomerates will also be the producer of valuable media content in the future.

News reporters, highly specialized journalists, researchers and investigators will be reporting 24/7/365 on the most disparate topics, and with a much higher degree of precision and depth than any other commercial publishing venture has been able to offer so far.

Individuals, the future "newsmasters" and "digital information librarians" will
be the ones that will elect themselves to become active filters and aggregators
of the increasingly vast amounts of information becoming available online.
Without them, you would be either submerged or you would have to surrender to the poor, superficial and frequently manipulated reporting available through
mainstream media channels only.

Individuals are also the new sustainable artists of tomorrow.

With new licensing approaches, radically innovative payment and sharing options the new musicians and videomakers have a growing set of routes to take to escape Hollywood illusionland.

Individuals are the ones enabling new fast-growing social and recommendation-based networks to grow at speeds we have not experienced before. You need to look no further than Spoke, Linkedin, and one of the many other emerging social networking systems to realize that this is field is burning hot and will continue to stay like this for the future to come. In the digitally networked future much more than in the physical past, we are as much "what we know" as "who we know".

Individuals are the new pioneers enabling a new breed of emerging real-time collaboration technologies to finally experience online offices and virtual rooms with full audio and video integration.

It is these same individuals who with these collaborative tools build powerful communities of practice, exchange, learning, and move our awareness and abilities to learn from others an order of magnitude ahead of where we were
before, isolated in our local physical realities.

Individuals are the bloggers, the new journalists, online reporters, and
corporate authors who leverage the flexibility and ease of use of these
simplified content management systems to facilitate greater exchange and
collaboration among people following shared goals and interests.

Individuals are the effective change agents and political forces of these times.

It is online that you find the ideas, the new opinion leaders, the counter-information that never makes it to your preferred newspaper or TV channel.

It is there because online is still the only place where true ideas can mature, be
cultivated, and grown in an organic fashion.

With the Internet and the unlimited opportunity given to each individual to
communicate, share, store, filter, and express hirself, individuals can now surf
unlimited networking.

Groups can form in the time of a virtual call and they can rapidly swarm around issues and problems to be solved with swiftness and self-organizational abilities hard to see at work among humans in the physical world.

It is here. This is the new frontier. One, that requires individuals with a
brave spirit and an open attitude toward openness and transparency to start
interacting and taking on the opportunities available in this new rich vastland.

The game of life for these individuals is all about searching, refining and
sharing with others the jewels of their work.

These new individuals merge socially valuable traits with an entrepreneurial spirit. They are not willing to prostitute their talents and intellectual abilities to serve the commercial mechanisms of any industry. They are ready to build a new universe in which each one of us is a company on his/her own.

In this brave new future each individual can effectively become an outside
supplier, an outsourced resource to one or more companies/organizations, while keeping intact hir abilities to work and produce independently.

If you are such an individual, keep coming back, as I am here scouting for you.

Stop surfing, start making WAVES !

Robin Good