‘The revolution will not be televised.’ is the title of the book by Joe Trippi, the man who gave Howard Dean the reputation of the first politiian to tap into grass-root networking, a.k.a. blogs.

Let’s temporarily assume that television is passe (not entirely true, loking at what’s going on in China, or with digital TV in Europe, etc). How much further could the communications revolution go once it has been open-sourced, blogged, webcast, and podcast? Or to put it another way, what else is there on the horizon? 

When Web 2.0 meets enterprise IT,  open sourc-ism will takes off says says Kim Polese (This and more at IT Conversations, which, not by accident is a free podcast.) It means the top-down models have to run for the exits as the bottom-up ones come into being. Polese calls it the ousting of the ‘Industrial ego system’ by the new eco system. Ego Vs Eco! So unlike a techy to phrase it that way!

It’s all about interoperatibility –that awful 18-letter word that describes how the new economy works. I was asked yesterday how podcasting will change communications when phones blend with ‘pods’ or MP3 players. Imagine what would happen if your MP3 player could send a message to mine. Or you could stream your content to a few folks in a room at a seminar. Would anyone care about your PowerPoint presentation at the far end of a room, when you could podcast it directly to a personal device that attendees can save –or even respond to at question time?

Broadband is making a lot of these things possible (Ever tried Skype?) as the pipes –or more accurately the wireless signals– that move data, text, audio & video transfer larger files at faster speeds.  WiMax is going to be the new standard for wi-fi, and should be here in laptops and pda’s by next year.  The revolution in content distribution and access, means that content will be shared on large scales, enterprise-wide. Check this out: MSNBC handled over 100,000 simultaneous ‘streams’ in May, when people logged on to watch the new Pope being elected in Rome. This was just on the web. The content delivery was handled by Limelight Networks. By the next Olympics in 2008, we will probably be watching (and sharing video) on wireless devices. Three years from now, marketing will be in a different league as our phones and ‘pods’ morph into 2-way, multi-media communication devices. Strong content and on-demand (permission) marketing will then play a big part in this new eco system.