NewsGator is neck-deep helping media companies evolve toward the new paradigm. Worth highlighting a couple of major trends:

1. My media.

Individuals want their stuff (audio, video, text; doesn't matter) when and where they want it.

And they want an extremely simple means of finding relevant stuff, and determining where and when it appears.

I think today's key is simplicity, which is a question of interaction and interface design, and (as technology evolves), editorial role.

Traditional media brands have a tremendous immediate opportunity to extend their brand equity around this evolving demand. As has been widely reported, they have to be aggressive about all this to survive.

RSS (powered by folks like NewsGator, of course -- full disclosure) allows any entity to become a multi-modal portal.

Traditional media haven't yet sufficiently exploited the opportunity for existing editorial staffs to help guide readers through the exploding content sources.

I talk to our clients about the Yahoo! Internet Life analogy... a magazine we launched in the late 90s. Seems completely anachronistic in retrospect -- a monthly glossy print publication to help people use Yahoo to find stuff on the web that was relevant.

But at the time, and for a while, the audience needed a trusted arbiter from traditional media to guide them through the morass of the new...

In short, I think 'my media' technologies provide an opportunity for traditional media to leapfrog the portals ...

2. I am my media.

Huge trend to self-creation of media. The trend is becoming corporate; with the $400 mill+ sale of About.com to the NYT, the investment world has decided that individual-generated content is a business.

Families are podcasting, and there are initiatives all over the country to corral bloggers into bigger editorial entities (bayosphere; The New West Network; etc etc).

Simple tools like Flickr have exploded... 8 million plus blogs growing at tens of thousands a day...

This puts it prettily;

But posting pictures or sharing video are different than becoming authors or broadcasters... and the editorial quality of the produced content is likely subject to a 99/1 rule -- 99% not worth republishing to a broader audience.

So I'm not as convinced that mainstream media need to become a broader platform for self-publishing (though they're trying to figure that out)...

All of which is a parallel conversation to the question of the role of evolving social media and the enterprise...

And the broader question of the societal implications of the media revolution ...

BTW, if you're knowledgeable about all this.... Forrester wants you...