Decentralists rule (in 10 years or so) aka I am an NMC 2004 Fencesitter!
My belief is that over time bandwidth, storage and hosting will become so easy to use and cheap that in 10 years or so, you will host everything on your own home server or servers.
Until then, there’s still lots of money to be made in hosted services like Blogware, TypePad, etc.. Basically anybody who can reduce or eliminate the pain and cost of sharing your stuff like photos, text, audio, video, etc. will win big.
Why I am writing this? Well, I will be attending the New Media Consortium Summer 2004 Conference aka NMC 2004 Summer Conference at UBC this Thursday-Saturday and there’s a raging debate between the Centralists, Decentralists and the Fencesitters started by the incomparable Brian Lamb, Alan Levine and D’Arcy Norman with their Weinberger inspired Small Pieces Loosely Joined wiki and presentation.