Can you specify in more details what you think is the scale of Julian's impact? From media coverage it looks like the impact has been huge, but is it really? I am not against Julian, I would not object if they selected him instead of Mark, I am just not sure that until now the real impact (of Wikileaks) on how the world operates was that big.
I believe he's a harbinger of things to come. Not necessarily in the sense of new leaks coming from WikiLeaks, which has been fairly tame so far.
I think, though, that Julian's basically validated the idea that a.) it's possible to collect, vet, and release potentially damaging information about powerful entities and b.) people care when you do. We've had time periods like this in the past (eg. the Muckraker era at the turn of the 1900s, the Pentagon Papers from the early 70s, Watergate), but the last such era seems to have been over 30 years ago. In the last 10+ years, we seem to have accepted the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to spy on us, but not okay for us to spy on them.
Julian was just the guy who had the balls to say "Umm, two can play at this game" and follow through on it. He's validated the market. It's like Napster and Friendster: the services themselves failed, but they paved the way for iTunes and FaceBook, which have become huge.
Can you imagine what'll happen when some enterprising anarchist hacker hooks up spyware, a botnet, and a spam network? It's not terribly difficult to write malware that scans each infected computer for any documents and posts them as spam comments to blogs or sends them out as spam emails. The thing is - once the information is out there, it naturally gets collaboratively-filtered. The interesting tidbits will be forwarded on or posted to Reddit, while the boring stuff will be deleted as garden-variety spam.
I suspect that there's already malware out there that does exactly this, but instead of posting confidential info to random blogs, it just uplinks it to the Chinese government or some Russian mafia syndicate.
The impact of WikiLeaks is that it's turned a spotlight on the damage that can be done - and more important, the attention that can be gained - by leaking information. That makes it far more likely that some bright, naughty teenager is going to think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if everything was out there?" and dump everything out there.
The balance of power between governments and citizens has been changed forever. In 100 years everyone will remember Julian Assange; no one will remember Mark Zuckerberg. And that's true even if WikiLeaks were now to vanish; there will be dozens of replacements (like OpenLeaks).
I seriously doubt many will remember him three years from now. The most noise about him is related to his Sweden affairs not something truly remarkable he has done.
And after listening to him on BBC I started to dislike him rather a lot.
I may be terribly wrong, but my gut feeling is that his main agenda is personal fame, or something else, not common good.
