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The media landscape is changing, not in one big way but in several ways at once. Here are three of the most important ones:

1. Publication is often the default choice.

The current rationale for editorial judgment comes, at base, from the economic risk publishers run of spending time and effort producing unpopular material. Those economic limitations to publication are now gone on the internet; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?" If a funny photo will amuse even two of my friends, there's little reason not to make it globally available.

There will be more data, and more kinds of data, produced and published by users every year. The balance of production will shift from the professionals to the amateurs, and as this happens, and an increasing number of companies will make their mark not as producers or even hosts of content, but as filterers and interpreters. Delicious creates remarkable value simply by aggregating individual labels; Ning provides a site for communities to form, from purely social groups through communities of practice devoted to improving their skills; MySpace and Facebook only exist as aggregators -- they offer no services of any use to the isolated individual, the opposite of the broadcast model.

Increasingly, the creation of value will shift from proprietary control of unique data to include the ability to combine that data with other, external sources, and even, in some cases (as with Technorati or NetVibes) to build value only with external sources.