By Edward Nawotka

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_0FgRKsqqUa

Richard Eoin Nash isn’t alone in thinking that  publishing as we know it is coming to an end. He’s part of a much broader constituency who believes the old paradigms are shifting away from individual producers and toward crowds. Among the chief progenitors of this idea is Clay Shirkey. His book Here Comes Everybody (now in paperback) codified the idea of crowdsourcing. In a speech he gave last year at the Web 2.0 conferences, he too said the old media ways were dead:

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race — consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

In the fast moving world of the Internet – where ideas are typically measured in 120 characters — Shirkey’s ideas have had surprising longevity.

His speech from Harvard in 2008 (embedded above) is worth bookmarking.

On another note, the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City earlier in the year {held earlier this year} offered a panel entitled “Building a Better Web Based Books,” which riffs on a similar theme and offers some ideas as to best practices: {? as to best practices?}