Last week, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were able to listen to a play back of what is believed to be the earliest mechanical sound recording. Made in 1860 by the French typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the "phonautogram" features the voice of a woman, believed to be Scott's daughter, singing a line from the French folk song, "Au Clair de la Lune." It was made with a device invented by Scott that used a stylus to etch patterns onto paper coated with smoke from an oil lamp.

While there are many areas of media that are going through changes, 2008 will be a particularly interesting year for the television industry. With YouTube already a household name, even the most notoriously defensive media giants have come to realize that online video is more than just an afterthought, in fact, it might just be the key to the new media castle.

Instead of the usual predictable predictions, I thought I would ring in the new year with five principles that I believe will guide the ongoing transformation of media companies.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve listened to print publishers debate whether to use a dedicated online sales staff or use what Borrell Associates calls “convergence sales,” in the report 2008 Local Online Outlook: Convergence Era Ends, Stand-Alone Sales Skyrocket. “Convergence” means, in the worst (all too common case), print sales reps tacking on online ads as an after thought, or — in one of the all-time great “shoot yourself in the foot” ad sales strategies — as “added value” (ad sales euphemism for “free”).

For most print publishers, mapping the audiences for their various titles would yield a cluster of overlapping circles — many readers of one of the publisher’s titles also read at least one other title. This is particularly true in trade publishing (magazines and books), where publishers often have multiple titles within a vertical, but it is also true of newspaper companies that publish many papers within a larger region. For these publishers, mapping readers’ interest in content across their vertical titles would yield a similar cluster of overlapping circles, as few readers are interested in ALL the content across ALL titles, but rather SOME content across SOME titles.

Here’s the next trend to study: Free. This is a video of Chris Anderson discussing his next book. Chris is the editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail. Kudos to whoever at Nokia decided to put this keynote online for the rest of us. And kudos to Core77 for finding it via Nova.

The case for why publishers should be able to charge for content on the web always revolves around the exceptions that prove the rule, e.g. Consumer Report and WSJ — which, let’s be honest, are the same examples everyone was using back in 1998. The problem with paid content on the web isn’t that it’s not possible — it’s that it’s HARD to do, because it requires that the content not be a commodity — and content not being a commodity typically means it’s not available anywhere else for free. And the web has made free content ubiquitous.