Book publishing used to be a pretty staid business, but no more. Consider the book "The Age of Conversation," a collaboration of more than 100 marketing professionals who wrote at the inspiration of marketing bloggers Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton. It took less than seven days to assemble the authors, whose book will appear electronically, as well as in paper format, via Triangle-based Lulu.com. All proceeds go to charities in the authors' home countries.

Remarkably, such collaborative ventures are no longer uncommon, often mining existing communities clustering around special interests in blogs. On a broader level, the trend mirrors what is happening as we use networking to link international resources, achieving virtual environments that tackle problems such as building and maintaining an operating system (the many versions of Linux). In the same vein, Microsoft is building new computer games for its Xbox 360 by releasing development tools that game players can build on.

But can you build a major part of your business using outsourced tools? Let's look at one company that's experimenting with the idea.

Phanfare is a photo organizing and editing site that allows you to publish your snapshots and videos online and share them with friends and family. The young company (www.phanfare.com) quickly became popular. Photos and especially videos eat up disk space, which is how Phanfare accumulated its first 40 terabytes of user data. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, and if you work out Phanfare's growth curve, you're looking at major storage needs down the road.

All that data, of course, is personal and doubtless precious to its owners, so you're also looking at the need for backups of your backups. In mid-July, Phanfare announced on its Web log that it had begun backing up all its photos and videos to Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known in the trade as S3. The company points out that the engineering costs in building out a similar system of data backups with multidata center redundancy exceed the savings it would have realized by doing the entire project in-house.

What's going on here and at Amazon should stay on your radar. Phanfare describes it as "game-changing." S3 was actually designed not to be a backup service but a key part of a company's infrastructure. All S3 data goes through multiple backups itself -- backups are part of the service -- ideally prompting more and more firms to use its abundant storage to house their operations.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos announced at the recent Web 2.0 expo that the S3 service, just over a year old, now housed 5 billion stored objects. It offers what can only be called "infrastructure on demand."

This is a new paradigm that puts more power than ever into the hands of small startups with big ideas. Instead of major cash allocations up front to build company networks, a young firm can turn key infrastructure demands over to Web services in a pay-as-you-go model.

Complementing all this is a second Amazon offering, Elastic Computer Cloud, or EC2. Now we're talking about computing in a way analogous to the power grid. When you need electrical power, you plug into a socket and pay a fee based on usage. When you need computing power, you tap into as many servers as you need through the EC2 interface, which is designed to work in conjunction with S3.

With no minimum fee and payment only for what you use, services such as these put resources into the hands of entrepreneurs. They're both new and due for protracted shaking out as problems are identified and case histories reveal their strengths and weaknesses.

But you can see that just as some applications are becoming Internet-only (think of Google's Gmail), so some of the heavy-lifting functions traditionally run by local networks are taking on a life of their own in the Web environment. You may choose not to go that route, but be aware that young and hungry competitors might disagree.

Meanwhile, what an interesting thing for Amazon to be doing. Still think of this company as a retailer? It's clear that Jeff Bezos has a broader idea, one that extends Amazon into an online operating platform for next-generation Web development. It will be fascinating to watch how these tools, designed not for individual users but for business and operating under the rubric Amazon Web Services, position the company against other firms with Web-based offerings of their own.

Google comes immediately to mind, but so does Microsoft.

The inside term for all this is operating "in the cloud," the cloud being the widely diversified resources available through Net connections. End users are beginning to see the benefits of using Web-based software, though until we get better responsiveness and improvements to their interfaces, many of these programs will take time to become popular.

But using major computer resources on a pay-as-you-go model can promise only good things for companies hoping to take their ideas to the next level against entrenched competition.