Last one in a series of things I think we’ll see more of in 2009.

Centralization of publishing tools 

We democritized publishing tools, and everyone knows a lot of efforts are being made to centralize our identities, but I think part of this will require centralizing the publishing tools themselves.  I contribute content to yelp, last.fm, craigslist, youtube, etc.  I’m doing this free, and not always to my direct personal benefit, because I don’t turn around and repost all of that content back on my personal blog.  Why not publish all this content for me using my identity on my blog, and then let all the other places pull that content from me?

Friendfree aggregates content from all my different publishing sources, but if I published them in one place, then this wouldn’t be an issue!  

Posterous is really the closest thing I’ve seen.  It enables you to post to a lot of different platforms via email, and it creates a central blog for you.  Disqus does this for commenting by building a history of comments I’ve made across many blogs and attributing that history to my user name.  

Maybe I need a hosted version of a system like this?  Could wordpress have a plugin for restaurant reviews, that also alerts Yelp of my post?

Energy awareness

The prius may sell even less next year as gas prices drop, but people seem to have caught on that electricity doesn’t grow on trees (though maybe it will in the future)!  The web will explode next year with all kinds of creative solutions making us more aware about our energy consumption and empowering us to take action (GigaOm’s already starting).  I’d like to see tools that do what Last.fm did for music habits or what mint.com does for personal finance;  automatically aggregate personal data and report back interesting findings and suggested actions.

Energy Hub is already buildng some hardware to solve the problem, and it’s cost saving value proposition will probably be an even bigger hit next year.  Existing sites like Dopplr are also find way to include energy focused tools like this nifty carbon calculators.

Every little step will count!