Three Glimpses of Photography's Future

By now I'm guessing that most people who read blogs (or email) have read Vincent Laforet's insightful, tough-love opus at Sports Shooter about the state of photography today (and tomorrow), The Cloud is Falling. It's a long piece, so there's a chance you might not have gotten to this late paragraph:

I'll leave you with this. If I
were 22-years old right out of college looking for a job or a career
path, I wouldn't be focusing on working on x newspaper to get to y
newspaper and then eventually z magazine with my 20 image portfolio
that contains 2 spot news photos, 4 sports pix, 4 feature photos, and a
10 picture story. That model is dead - to put it bluntly. I'd be
thinking big - realizing that I have a chance to be a pioneer in this
new world of opportunity. Trying to think up of the next big thing.

Woohoo Vincent. You tell 'em. I've been saying this for years, especially because many of the photographers I'm frequently in contact with are, to varying degrees, just out of college, and I know they have the talent to get this revolution off on the right foot. Anyway, it's nice to have that idea reiterated by one of today's biggest photojournalists, especially when he supports it with so much first-hand evidence.

This whole thing has gotten me thinking about what this "new world" might look like, and I've found a couple of promising things (see below). To my mind, the faster we recognize and assimilate the good ideas, the faster we can move on to the even better ones.