ReadWriteWeb

As we begin a new year, I thought I would take a moment to review where Web publishing has come and where it seems to be going. We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the "golden age of blogging" into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era.

That isn't to say that blogs are over: we at RWW certainly don't think so. But the very nature of the blog is changing. The days are coming to an end when, as Scott Fulton has said most recently: "You can have freedom from bias or you can have freedom from oversight. You cannot have both." Jon Mitchell wrote earlier in December about new ways of writing, publishing and advertising online.

We're not out of the woods yet, but Web publishing is starting to hit its stride. Product offerings are getting smarter, prices are getting better and, most importantly, the content is getting more interesting. We might not even be half way to the future of publishing yet, but the industry is picking up steam.

There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.

As technology companies like Google, Sony, and Intel are working to deliver Web content into the living room, Web publishers, content producers, and advertisers are busy looking into the (not so distant) future to determine how to be successful in this new space.

As a Web publisher with a strong video focus, we're used to facing pretty steep technical challenges in trying to get our content onto your TV. It's hard to believe that just two years ago the only device capable of playing Web content on TV was TiVo. With a relatively small installed base of 1.5 million subscribers and proprietary software, it was tough to get on the platform and even tougher to reach a sizable audience.

Fliptop, a new content subscription service, is one of several companies presenting at this week's DEMO conference in Palm Springs. Among a large group of startups, this was one of the first to catch my eye, making me think "wow, I need that!" In short, what Fliptop offers is a simple way to subscribe to a website's content. But unlike traditional RSS feeds, which just offer a direct feed which must be added to an RSS reader like Google Reader or FeedDemon, Fliptop's service provides more features, like the option to filter content by keyword, follow only select topics or categories and the ability to receive email digests of the just content you're interested in.

From branchnext, the same company that delivered the personal web scout service Yotify (our coverage), there comes a new B2B alerts service called LetMeKnow. As with Yotify, LetMeKnow lets you track any number of changes that happen on the web - from price changes to new blog posts or comments and much more. However, unlike Yotify's consumer-facing service, LetMeKnow is designed for use by web publishers instead.