Next year? This interview with Esther Dyson, one of technology’s deepest thinkers, includes this ironic (for me, at least) look into the crystal ball:

iMediaConnection: …Tell us something we don’t know yet but we’ll find out in the next year.

Dyson: The thing I’m writing my next issue about is kind of interesting. Two or three years ago, there was this wonderful Wall Street Journal article about the secret phenomenon of small women buying their clothes in the kids’ department. And there’s another secret phenomenon going on right now — it’s small businesses buying their software and their services in the consumer department. And that the really big business places right now, I think, are Yahoo! and Google and eBay.

They’re the providers to small businesses. Yahoo! is something like 10 percent of the small business Web hosting market. They’re the largest player. eBay is 430,000 small businesses — which is again about 5 percent of the total number of small businesses determined by the Small Business Administration.

Google with all its local marketing, its ad words. You know, suddenly, small businesses can get online and market, because every small business person in his or her secret life is also a consumer. And so they get marketed to online, they get email campaigns, they buy things off the Internet, they see ads — and suddenly all these tools are accessible to them, not through some big business vendor like SAP but through all the same old things. Through Google, through Yahoo!.

The irony? I guess I’ve been harping on this topic for quite a while (scroll to bottom) and in my day job, publish a magazine for 600,000 small business owners. Exactly four years ago, we ran this interview with Chris Locke about some of the topics I guess we’ll be learning about next year, as well.

As I often explain to our magazine’s advertisers, small businesses are not minature big businesses. Think of them as consumers on steroids who often use consumer supply channels and tools like a Visa card, but who make $10,000 (or more) in purchases each month instead of $1,000.

Dumenco praises another customer magazine: Simon Dumenco, editor of the Benetton customer magazine, Colors, eloquently mourns the demise of another customer magazine in his column in the current issue of Folio:. Oh, yes, and he uses a “disclosure” at the end of the column to attempt once more to convince himself (no one else buys it) that he is not the editor of a customer magazine created, owned, funded and published as a marketing-vehicle by a clothing company. (More on that below.)

Here are some highlights:

SO WHY MOURN THE DEATH of (A&F Quarterly and Martha Stewart Living)?

Because they were deeply original. They took creative risks. They pissed people off. They were more than a little bit nutty. They were, let’s admit it, really cool fetish magazines (MSL enthralling readers with consumer porn, and A&FQ titillating with…soft-core porn).

The inevitable lesson of MSL’s decline and A&FQ’s demise may be that it has simply become too risky for any conglomerate to promulgate a strongly individual point of view.

How poignant it must be for the creators of these publications to see faint echoes of their vision throughout magazineland — visions that have been put through the corporate blanderizer to make them truly palatable to the masses. The particular talent of being able to bowdlerize quirky genius for mass consumption may soon become the most essential skill among editors-in-chief in big media. Think of any current editing icon (Graydon Carter, Anna Wintour); it’s not hard, is it, to imagine them being replaced by anonymous, industrious up-managers who know a great table-top product shot when they see one?

From here on out, we can expect even more corporate anonymity and less editorial personality — but plenty of perky blandness!

As I said, below the column, Dumenco writes, in third-person, this “disclosure”:

Full disclosure: Dumenco is editor of Colors, the international culture magazine that is funded, in part, by Benetton. (It has never featured Benetton clothing, contains no shopping or product guides, and has never competed with A&FQ.)

Sorry. I’m finding it hard to type while laughing so hard at that public-broadcasting-nomenclature-inspired “funded, in part, by Benetton” doublespeak. As noted before by this weblog, Colors is funded “in whole” by Benetton, who also owns it and promotes it on its corporate website (screen grab). As pointed out before, Simon apparently has dreamed up an imaginary world in which a magazine that receives advertising and newsstand revenues can claim (because of those third-party revenue streams) that it is not “funded, in whole” by the company that owns and publishes it. Such rationale would mean every advertising-supported, retail-distributed magazine is “funded, in part” by its publisher. Simon may be a great magazine writer and editor, but his expertise as a magazine economist is a bit suspect.

As for Colors never containing shopping or product guides, I will point out also that Benetton’s advertising (at least that for which it is famous and all that I have seen) has never featured Benetton products or prices (they don’t even have prices on their website). So, I once more speculate that in Simon’s imaginary world, those ads are merely “art” commissioned and funded by Benetton.

(Special bonus: From Simon’s column, I discovered this interview with the erstwhile A&F Quarterly editor Savas Abadsidis. In the interview, Abadsidis provides Dumenco with an honest alternative to his delusional denial.

BT: Well, what was the goal of A&F Quarterly? Was it to sell clothes? Or were you really trying to make the magazine a culture of its own?

SA: A little bit of both….(former Details Magazine editor) David Keeps once complimented the Quarterly as being corporate sponsored subversiveness. Of course the goal was to sell clothes, but it was more than that… I think we really tried to tap the rebellious spirit of being young and on fire… excited by life and pedantically selling clothes to such a fickle market like college students would never work in a traditional way.)

Liberal magazine admits, Bush good for its economy: The editor of the The Progressive magazine credits Bush for helping double its circulation. The magazine is “soaring in popularity,” he says, because its readers are disgusted with the President. However, he’s puzzled that “the only” progressive candidate, Dennis Kucinich, belly-flopped in the primaries and why Bush’s approval ratings are improving. And he makes the fantasy-like observation that, “had Dean not made a few misitakes, he could have had the nomination.” As for Kerry, he says, “He’s got that huge, stentorian voice, and it’s hard for people to relate to him as an individual.” It seems clear the Progressive is pulling for Bush so that it may continue its current successful circulation marketing strategy.