I'm really, really interested in the future of content publishing and how things will look fifty years from now. There's a trend across almost all forms of media towards easier, faster, wider and less expensive production and distribution. This is a Good Thing, but it introduces some interesting problems.

One of the main roles of traditional publishing is content curation. This seemed less important in the past when it simply seemed a byproduct of media products (books, tv shows, films etc.) being expensive to produce and distribute. But now, it's becoming clearer that curation is going to become a difficult problem to solve when it's trivial for people to publish their own product on the same platform as internationally successful content authors.

Sturgeon's law applies. In fact, it applies more now than ever because the minimum bar of quality has been lowered. How are we going to navigate something like the Kindle store as vastly increasing proportions of it become saturated with garbage?

I know curation is kind of a buzzword in startup circles at the moment, but it's vastly, vastly important. As a trivial aside, in another tab I'm reading a thread where people recommend the best little-known free software they use. Most of the top replies recommend a single software, most of which I then took a look at. One of them is a list of perhaps 20 softwares; my eyes glazed over and I moved on to the next reply.