The dawn of the web has given the word "publishing" a whole lot of new dimensions. In fact, the web is nothing but about publishing after all. Publishing means basically making content, mainly text, images and multimedia available for a broader audience. Since such a wide audience can now reach the web, online media has become an interesting channel for publishing. There are several advantages of online publishing, amongst which the most important one is probably the timeliness. Publishing on the web has become more or less instant, particularly since the rise of "Web 2.0", the participative web.

It's not the web only

The web has indubitably changed the possibilities of publishing, but this is not the only innovation within the last two decades that had a significant impact. More and more digital devices have also changed the way, we can create digital content. The digital photo camera is a good example. Whereas earlier, photos had to be developed, scanned, cropped, manipulated and put online, publishing now is a matter of plugging your digital camera and hit the "send to flickr" button in the software that automatically pops up upon connection. Needless to say, this is just the beginning. The ubiquitous camera phone allows anybody to create audio or video content with a minimal amount of effort and bluetooth enables people to share or transfer their content easily. YouTube and Flickr are just a glimpse of what is coming along our way.

Meta- what?

The future will all be about metadata. Creating digital content is one thing, categorizing and giving it context the other. Many attempts to categorize the web have failed, and currently we can observe folksonomy emerging as a efficient variant of taxonomy. Tagging has become people's hobbies and hardly any project nowadays doesn't include tagging. It has been proven to be an effective way of filtering the big and chaotic pool of data and information that can be found online.

One piece of metadata in the context of digital images is of course the physical location on the globe, where the picture had been taken. Global positioning technology enables us nowadays to tell where we are by the accuracy of centimeters. There are many plans to include GPS technology into digital cameras and this development is self-evident because location as a context of an image is probably the easiest to grasp and understand for anyone. Assuming that all images on flickr are not only enriched with the metadata of the exact time they had been taken but also where, it would be easy to compile a world map that shows images in dependency of their origin. In fact, this has already been done. The difference is here, most pictures are "geotagged" manually, which is a long and inconvenient process.

But what should the content be?

So creating content, particularly with digital media has become easy. The next question of course is now, what the content should be. There too, the web has emerged a new trend. Everyday things we do can not only be recorded and kept in pictures easily, it can also increase in value by sharing it. "Value" here is not meant in monetary terms but in common public interest. The obsession with documenting can hit such a level, people start documenting absurd things such as unwrapping Apple products. In fact, people already fake Apple products unwrapping ceremonies. The value of this however can be questioned... Do we all end up drawining in a pool of trashy nonsignificant documentations of self-staging narcists?