broadcast model (r)evolution
Tom Evslin has a good post up about Mass Customization, referencing an interesting article from the New York Times about mass customization in the advertising space specifically. Tom describes how the transition from the broadcast era to the Internet era is resulting in both a longer tail of (goods, services, content) available to us, and a greater ability for us to access custom slices of the long tail (and the rest of the curve as well).
The second part - our access to custom slices - is an immense paradigm shift in of itself. Technology (Amazon, Google, etc.) already customizes our view (often without us even knowing it), and this will improve over time as companies/algorithms do a better job of mining and correlating our data to discover our preferences, and as technology evolves that directly asks us for inputs to help improve the results of the algorithmic preference determination.
Future "channels" of content will not just be broadcast by a middlemen (like a TV network today). Channels will be a combination of individually customized channels (you dictate all the choices; like your RSS feeds today), channels automatically constructed by companies like Google and Amazon based mainly on algorithms and tweaked by you, and channels built based on the preferences of social networks of individuals (e.g. the preferences of a Facebook group that you belong to), and the old broadcast channels.
Related from previous NextBlitz discussions:
Open up frequencies to eliminate the supply-side issue that helps cause today's TV channel bundling
Future of mass media is billions of small (customized) parts
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