XML in the Crystal Ball: Publishing, Syndication, Marketing

Over the years, I`ve been involved in just about every part of every aspect of the publishing industry, which is ironic given that I consider myself a programmer. One of the things that I find when dealing with XML is that no matter what you do, you`re never all that far removed from the realm of publishing. I don`t think that this is accidental - for all of the talk within the Semantic web of machines talking to machines, the Internet is still fundamentally a communication medium between people. Publishing is simply the process of persisting that communication.

The publishing industry is going through its second revolution, one that is in many ways even more profound than its first in the 1980s, and given that publishing tends to be a vanguard area for technology that eventually finds its way into business, understanding what`s happening in the publishing sector is a very good way of seeing what the future will look like in a whole number of different areas within the next five to ten years.