It used to be that every industry had its gatekeepers.

Music had the fat guys with cigars that Pink Floyd loved to sing about.  Factories had foreman that slapped each other on the back.  Corporations had bosses that controlled resources.  Political parties had precinct captains and party leaders.  And for the last decade, publishing has had agents acting as the gatekeepers.

All these industries still have and will have gatekeepers that control people and products not based on their merit, but on the connections and favors owed.  That will never change completely.

But now there are other ways.

I’m fond of reading Seth Godin, both his blog and his books.  I would recommend Tribes and Linchpin to everyone, regardless of the industry, even someone tending the house and kids on a daily basis.

For years, he’s been teaching how to get past the gatekeepers of the world, even when that gatekeeper is one’s own fear.  Gatekeepers were a necessary tool in the age of the Big Industry.  In Big Industry, economies of scale provided the economic boost.  Favors worked when there wasn’t much competition and information was scarse.  Now those lumbering dinosaurs are too large to function in this nimble mammal world.

The publishing industry, one of the last of the great white behemoths, has just started to come to this realization–cue Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The last few years, Dean and Kris, have been speaking online about taking control of your career as a writer.  They’ve been talking about this privately at their wonderful workshops for a long time before that, but we’ll stick with what’s in the public record.

This honest self-reliant tone struck well with me and it reminded me much of Seth Godin, albeit specific to the publishing industry.  Now that the e-publishing market is available; many authors, old and new, are debating the usage of such systems.  Dean and Kris are leading such a debate on their dual blogs.  Instead of the big bad gatekeeper in the huge conglomerate buildings of New York, we only have our own fear holding us back.  No longer is the holy grail of an agent required to get a book sold (not that it ever really necessary, but that’s a different discussion all together.)

Seth Godin’s book Tribes talks about how to build a movement one person at a time, slowly, leveraging technology and using our passion and skill.  The old way was to get picked by the elites, sudden and full of heady success.  The new way is to build deliberately, slowly and full of frequent failures.

Seth says it best as:

“Does your project depend on a miracle, a bolt of lightning, on being chosen by some arbiter of who will succeed? I think your work is too important for you to depend on a lottery ticket. In some ways, this is the work of the Resistance, an insurance policy that gives you deniability if the project doesn’t succeed. “Oh, it didn’t work because we didn’t get featured on that blog, didn’t get distribution in the right store, didn’t get the right endorsement…”

Dean and Kris have been telling us the same thing for years.  Be it on rewriting through workshops, or giving up because of rejections, or sending directly to editors.  Being a writer the way they explain it is the same way Seth describes Tribes.  It takes hard work and patience.  You can’t eat an elephant all in one bite and becoming a writer is one mighty big elephant.

Those frequent failures are going to be painful.  When you sell to a big traditional publisher, you can always blame it on them because of bad marketing or a bad cover.  When your book goes out on the e-publishing market and it doesn’t sell as well as you’d like, then it’s all on you.  But that’s okay.  Getting it out there is the hard part and you’ll do better next time.

Matt Mullenweg recently wrote about Apple and their willingness to fail in his post 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number.  If Steve Jobs, the turtlenecked guru, can stomach not having copy+paste on his first iPhone, then I can give it my best and be happy with the result.

In Dean’s New World of Publishing and Kris’s Business Rusch , they explain how to navigate this new world of publishing.   One of the most important points they make to new writers is that the new model is going to be slow.   But that’s okay, Seth already warmed me up to the idea that building a tribe takes time.

Plus, meeting people along the way, one-at-a-time, is a lot more fun than plugging into a massive corporate box any day.

Unless you’ve been living in a box today, you know that Apple finally unveiled the tablet iPad today. The biggest surprise about the announcement was the lack of a camera on the lap sized PC. No camera, really? If you don’t believe it, check the official spec page.

Besides the implications for augmented reality, which I’ll get to in a moment, the iPad not having a camera is a giant fail.  I actually expected the iPad to have two cameras.  One forward-looking so the iPad could function as a giant Polaroid and the other user-facing so videos could be recorded.  We could forgive eliminating one of them, probably the forward-looking one since its so big, but not having the user-facing camera is inexcusable. 

The series of tube we call the Internet has moved beyond simple text.  People want to record and upload videos straight to YouTube without having to yank out their dust-covered hand held or use Skype to call their friends while they’re watching the game. 

The Apple iPad not having even one camera is like hooking up satellite without DVR.  Sure you can do it, but why? 

Of course, I’m being overly melodramatic here. 

The real point to the iPad is competition for the Kindle, eReader and the Vook.  Apple wants to revolutionize the way we read magazines, books and newspapers.  Functionality for augmented reality isn’t even an afterthought.  How many people are using their camera lying in bed reading an interactive book?

And is this a major setback for augmented reality?  Not really.  A giant-sized magic lens would add a fun new canvas to play with, but really wouldn’t be a game changer.  Additionally, Apple isn’t expecting the tablet market to come even close to the smartphone market in sales.

So in the end, the iPad is a fail for augmented reality, but will probably give Jeff Bezos nightmares for months as he wonders how he’s going to compete against a Pentium 286 when he’s selling a Commodore 64. 

And maybe, just maybe, Steve Jobs is still working on a see-through AR-enabled HMD.  Then I’d say, all is forgiven Stevie, I’m coming home to Apple.