Skydiving down the face of a mountain.

I am constantly on the lookout for what is next in the online world so that I can be nimble and have the appearance of being able to read the future. If you were to go back 3 years ago and look at the online landscape and look for trends, if you were very perceptive, you might have just seen podcasting be born. For those who are completely invested in the online world, it is hard to imagine the podcasting, something that we take for granted, is that young.

For those few who were perceptive and quick on the uptake comes notoriety which is extraordinarily hard to replicate today in podcasting. There are names like Dawn and Drew, The Evil Genius Chronicles, SoccerGirl Inc. among others who started podcasts and captured attention early. I would posit that if these same people were to start a podcast now, they would languish in obscurity. Being the early bird definitely has its perks.

That means that it is very important to be ever vigilant for what’s next in the online scene. I think I have found a candidate and it is something that I am calling nanoblogs. Nanoblogs are quick little 1 or 2 phrase or sentence blogs that keep your friends up-to-date with where you are, and what you are doing. (I just did a search and it appears that Rafe Needleman has already coined this phrase and has an entry out there talking about nanoblogging. You will just have to take my word for it, I thought of this name on my own in parallel with Rafe.)

The first one I heard about nanoblogging on a podcast called Net-at-Nite. Leo LaPorte and Amber McArthur were talking about Twitter, a brand new service that allowed its users to write extraordinarily short blog entries and post them. Really what it amounted to was a moment by moment, blow by blow commentary on the minutia or the writers life. It is not uncommon for a Twitter user to post a passing thought, her current location, an annoyance, or whatever tiny tidbit crosses their mind.

I subscribed to Leo LaPorte’s twitter feed for a couple of days. I set it up so that the updates would come in through my cell phone. It was a strange couple of days of electronic voyeurism that was strangely interesting. I finally shut off the barrage of IMs when I discovered I was running through my small allotment of monthly SMS’s very quickly.

Another technology that I just heard about is a micro to nano blogging tool called www.tumblr.com. It is a new thing that is just like a regular blog only much, much lighter. In fact, the more I think about it, it is in the middle of nanoblogging and standard blogging. You can call it a microblog.

I don’t know if nanoblogging or microblogging will have the impact of podcasting, but it does seem to be the latest permutation of the RSS society that we are building. Who knows this could be a bridging technology to something yet unimagined. Whatever it is it seems to be the next thing for whatever it is worth.

By the way you can subscribe to my Twitter Feed right here.