I've also noticed a dramatic uptick lately in the chatter about the digital nomad lifestyle on social networking sites, such as . are reporting increases in traffic to their sites. Why?

A perfect storm of micro-trends are colliding before our very eyes to facilitate the lifestyle of traveling while working, and working while traveling. These include the usual suspects, such as the declining price of electronics and bandwidth and of an increasingly globalized economy. But they also include trends that don't seem that obvious.

The biggest of these is that the technologies, products and services that digital nomads use to work while traveling are themselves becoming popular among everybody, even those who never travel. Just read the headlines on this news site. . . . . . . . These are digital nomad-enabling trends, but everybody is participating in them. It will get to the point where the only difference between an ordinary white-collar worker and a digital nomad is an airplane ticket.

Products like Amazon.com's line of e-book reader, the Kindle, and the gaming system Zeebo (from Tectoy and Qualcomm), use a newish model for delivering mobile broadband. Under this model, the cell-phone carrier supplies cell-phone-style wireless data, and their customer is the content provider (Amazon.com or Zeebo, for example), not the end user. In both cases, most of the use of the connection is for buying things, so the device maker has an incentive to provide the otherwise free broadband. Users love it because they never see a wireless bill or worry about extra charges for data. And the carriers love it because they get additional revenue without any customer-acquisition costs or additional infrastructure buildouts.