Derek Powazek, creator of Fray, and one of my employees at Electric Minds (which launched ten years ago), has created a DIY photography magazine: JPG Magazine is as much community as publication; like flickr, members can upload their digital photographs, categorize them, and share them with others — but JPG community members rate the photos, and the top-rated are published in a paper magazine. Powazek’s DIY magazine manifesto, A Tale of Three Communities, puts it this way:

One of the many gifts of our increasingly networked world is the diminishing boundaries between communities. And the magazine business is about to get hit by a boundary-blurring tidal wave.

It’s already started. What’s the difference between NBC and Joe Everynerd on MySpace or YouTube? They’re all just usernames - each with an equal chance of getting seen. The traditional roles of content creator and consumer have been irrevocably blurred.

Magazines, on the other hand, still have very high walls between their writers and readers. The writers and editors enjoy the illusion that they do something no one else can. The readers, then, have only one job: to consume the product.

But if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that the world is full of people who know a lot more than you do about something. Think up any niche and you’ll find a site out there, powered by some lone geek, with everything you ever wanted to know. Whether it’s knowing what’s cute or how to build a monorail, it’s all out there.

The internet has also taught us that when all those people with all those diverse interests come together, they can pool their knowledge together to make amazing things. Think Wikipedia or Digg. Given the right tools, crowds can truly be wise.

The magazine business was built on scarcity and inequality. The editors guarded the gates of the printing press to make sure that only the best ideas got in. They had to - there was only so much paper.

But online, there’s a scarcity of scarcity. Web pages, unlike paper, scroll to be as long as they need to be. The gatekeepers have no mandate here. And, as a result, we’ve seen a flowering of authentic media the likes of which the world has never seen.

The online world has created a culture of creation among ordinary people. Meanwhile, magazines are still partying like it’s 1899. Writers write, readers read, and never the twain shall meet.

Simply put, this can’t last.

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