Last year I was obsessed with 2006 being the year of the "casual publisher" which I guess it might have been if you buy the load of hoopla Time magazine heaped on us with the Person of the Year but I'm not sure we got as far as I would have liked. Sure YouTube is the absolute bee's knees and they really do deserve almost $2b of Google's money they got, but it's not because of the explosion in casual publishing they've enabled (it's because they did something really amazing in giving the bits of television that serve to hold our culture together permalinks that we could all email, IM, and post to our blogs).

And no, wikipedia— though even more awesome than YouTube— does not make for a universe of casual publishers (for instance, it's been 18 months since I last contributed to an entry). What Wikipedia did prove in 2006 is that the dynamic from the Professor and the Madman can be amplified 1000-fold with the Internet and broadened way beyond the scope of the OED.

We spent the year at Tabblo focused on the casual publisher. Our particular twist was that the distance between "photo sharer" and "casual publisher" was short and easy to cross if you could pre-select the type of person coming to you by giving them an app with the right attributes. Our angle was (and still is) collaborative story-telling with pictures and words, helped by a personal art director in software and the ability to go from online to print with a few clicks of the mouse.

The good news was that more than a million people seemed interested enough to at least drive by and take a look with a good number of them staying around to make some really outstanding stuff. The more interesting news however, is that we've still got a bit of work to do to truly make it casual and that this looks like a great year for that to happen.

By casual we don't just mean easy (which is where we'll be focused for the next few months) but also compelling, relevant, and right-sized. This last bit is the big lesson from all of personal publishing in 2006— and the hardest one to get right. For instance, blogs are really interesting and compelling but for most people they are the hammer of personal publishing; that is, sitting down to compose an entry like this one takes forethought, time, and sweat. I am afraid that is is still the same for tabbloing— giving people that much creative freedom amidst a community of artistes who live to look at each other's work necessarily implies that authors have to really make an effort to tabblo. We attempted to mitigate some of this by building a publishing platform where distribution could be varied with access controls (from 1 person to the world), and as the folks at Six Apart have learned, this does help a bit— but it doesn't solve the whole problem.

We also attacked it with different formats— defining some as quick and others as more involved and elaborate. We did this specifically with the introduction of books and other printable products that could also be shared virtually. This gives you two axes— intended audience size and type of output which does provide some freedom to do all sorts of different kinds of things depending on your mood and intent.

But there is still one big problem in getting the experience to the right size: the ease of publishing when the moment motivates you to do so. The mobloggers got this from the very beginning— blogging from your cellphone wasn't just about "hey cool I can blog from my cellphone!" but also about being able to casually publish during the holes in your day (waiting in line at the supermarket, riding the subway, driving). Unfortunately the experience is just too cumbersome for most device/platform combinations. That said, the product that did the best job of bringing the potential of mobile-based publishing this year was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Odeo, Twitter. Sure, they're only aiming to help you answer the question: "What are you doing?" but everyone of those SMSes has just picked up a thread, an audience, and most importantly, a permalink (no surprise that this product is from Ev and some of the other ex-Blogger folks).

Even if Twitter solves it for the words that come out of SMSes though, I want to see it solved for photos, audio, video, even the data that comes out of my Nike+/iPod running partner. We'll be giving it our own unique twist for photos at Tabblo this year, but as 2007 bring all sorts of new device/data combinations, the opportunities are almost limitless.

To close: why the hell should we care? I would argue that we should care because it turns out that casual publishing is a lot more like voicemail and a lot less like commercial radio— it's an opportunity to make connections with the fellow tribesfolk you most care about in new and interesting ways. And as Barry Schwartz argues in his book, it is these relationships (and the constraints they bring with them) that truly make us happy and fulfilled.

And even if you don't buy that, Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) had another possible reason in the best answer in this year's Edge question with his "Metcalfe's law of minds." Essentially, it this type of activity that can make us smarter as a species more quickly than anything that came before it. This too should be plenty of reason why you too should continue rooting for the casual publisher in 2007.