The Miracle Of Publishing

Many of us are in awe over what’s happening to the newspaper industry. Many of us worry that the book publishing industry might be right at the beginning of where the music industry was as Napster broke through to the mass market. Either way, there’s something much more amazing happening…

The ability to publish anything: text, images, audio and video is, practically, free. This is astounding when you really stop and think about it. Granted, this is not a groundbreaking thought, but it is something that we can – once in a while – take a break from our regular Tweeting schedule to stop and appreciate the incredible world and interconnectedness of each and every one of us.

There are no barriers to you having a creative, instructive or even destructive thought and putting that thought out there for the world to read, see, hear and watch. And just as the generations before us would marvel every time a phone rang and it was someone on the other line who was not in shouting distance, or when they walked into a building, flicked a switch and there was brightness ("let there be light!", I believe our generation might not truly appreciate what channels like Blogging, Podcasting, online social networks and Twitter have done to help make thoughts and ideas spread.

Being able to publish your thoughts this quickly is a miracle.

In the late eighties, I was a journalist. I would be assigned a story, write it up, send it over to my Editor and then just wait. Sometimes only a few weeks, but in other instances it was months before the story was published and available for the masses. There were times when there was so much lag between the story being written and the publishing date that when the article came out, I could hardly recognize my own words. It wasn’t just the length of time that passed, but having that space in between the writing and publishing sometimes changed my perspective. It could have been inspiration from an outside source or just something from within that slightly shifted my perspective. Unfortunately, there was not that much I could do about it. It was printed. Final. Done.

The new type of movable type.

Now the story is just beginning. Through comments, links, posting the content in places like Facebook and Twitter, the idea moves in different, organic and interesting ways. Publishing online makes text very three-dimensional. Additional thoughts can be added as they happen. Different comments can create new offshoots of Blog posts or inspire a audio Podcast. The ability to have those thoughts be Blogged about by others (some might agree, while other might add their own differing opinion) pushes these ideas further out.

So, no, maybe having a Blog does not sound like the most amazingly new thing in the world a Marketer can do, but the ability to instantly publish your thoughts to the world is (in my humble opinion) a total miracle and something we should reflect on and appreciate much more often.