So I’m on a plane as I write this with no fewer than 15 browser tabs open, the “view source” code from six different web pages, 31 text files full of JavaScript, HTML and PHP code, a (regretfully disconnected) secure FTP client, and five Photoshop documents.

Just another round of pre-We Media web site preparation.

I like to think of myself as the “luckiest lurker on the planet” after having the good fortune to be laid off from a startup web site just in time to hook up with the work Andrew Nachison (and later joined by Dale Peskin) started at The Media Center at the American Press Institute.

In just a little more than seven years, there have been so many conferences, so many innovators, and so many great ideas I’ve been able to consciously and sub-consciously absorb. I now have a perpetually bad habit of rattling off about 15 possible ways to approach an online challenge that results in my bosses becoming vexed at my inability to capture all the things I was just babbling about. So thanks for that …

When those conferences first started, the buzzword was the “convergence” of a media company’s various tools (print, radio, television and the web). There was also a bit of turbulence over the ubiquity and role of the growing blogosphere (giving everyone a mic at a conference for 100 people produces some interesting results). Now the talk is about “We Media.”

While most of the talk and discussions will center around what’s next and looking forward, I like to look at the force of We Media in comparison to those early convergence days. At the heart of some of the convergence challenges was getting media companies to simply communicate with their own people, regardless of their particular discipline. I learned about some of this first-hand as an early employee of another We Media attendee, Jim Brady, during the late 1990’s at Washingtonpost.com.

Today, such struggles are in the metaphorical breakdown lane as more and more people are being empowered to be and find their own sources of media. If a newsroom can’t figure out its own issues, it will simply feel a strong breeze from those passing them in the fast lane.

As always, my desired takeaways are fairly simple to define. What new strategies are the really smart kids trying now, and what cool tools can I play with next?