Prediction: The End of the Magazine Issue

Gosh, with The Daily Beast launching, The New York Times redesigning and Arianna Huffington getting profiled in The New Yorker, could I have picked a worse day to be sequestered in a San Francisco hotel with extremely limited internet access? Probably not. (Confidential to the Westin St. Francis: If you're going to charge 15 bucks a day for wireless, it should at least be accessible everywhere in your hotel.)

But here I am, at the American Magazine Conference, where the futurist Paul Saffo just gave an extremely funny and thought-provoking presentation on what's down the road for media. In a word, it's "smartifacts." "The next phase in technology is the arrival of cheap, ubiquitous sensors" like the ones that now come embedded in Nike running shoes, he says. "Probably the biggest source of information being published in 10 years will be machines, not people."

Saffo talked a lot about how most major innovations are preceded by decades of failure. He cited the e-book as an example -- a technology that is only now coming into its own after 20 years as a laughingstock. "The Kindle is the 128k Mac of e-books," he said. "It's not the iPod of ebooks, but the iPod is coming" -- very likely from Apple itself, he predicted.

"These devices, when they arrive in the next few years, are going to have as big an impact on the publishing business as the iPod and the iTunes store has had on the music business," he said. And not just on books, but on magazines as well. "The issue may go the way of the record. It may go the way of the album."

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