If you’ve not been to the TED site, go there and take a look around. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) started as an invite only conference of the world’s leading thinkers and doers, and the site has an amazing collection of videos from some of these talks. If you work in the media in any way, it’s stuff you need to see. You’ve probably already seen it. [TED has an insightful video from designer David Carson you should watch as well if design is your persuasion]

One of the newest TED videos was brought to my attention via Dave Allen on Twitter earlier today, and it essentially sums up the recent changes in the media, analyzing how information delivery and consumption has changed. “As recently as last decade most of the media that was produced for public consumption was produced by professionals. Those days are over, never to return.”

The talk from Clay Shirky breaks down the importance of new tools like Twitter in news delivery, and explores how information has become much more social. “The internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and coversation at the same time,” he says. “Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape, a new producer joins … It’s as if when you bought a book they threw in the printing press for free.”

Part of the reason I rebuilt this site on the WordPress Publishing platform a few months back is that its flexibilty allows for important updated touches such as this, and it’s incredibly easy to make additions like this to all the existing content on the site. With the simple update of a style sheet or the addition of a widget like ShareThis, an upgrade can happen in minutes.

Now you’ll see the ShareThis icon at the end of of every post, and it’s as simple as clicking on a sharing option and forwarding to friends. I’ve been unacceptably slow to add this feature as it’s probably one of the most important web tools today.