The difference between our collective generation and your generation (differentiating the reporters from the students) is that we poured our souls out on paper that got easily yellowed and lost. The danger is that many of your friends (nodding at the students) are putting intimate ideas in cyberspace journals. So when today's 15-year-old is 40, some friend is going to drag out all of that idiotic stuff at their class reunion.

I think the most important thing that a company can do, not just in the customer space but the employee space, is to be completely open and completely honest. Don't pretend that you're doing something that you can not do. There's an old saying in Silicon Valley, "It's not a bug. It's a feature."

Take cyberspace as an example. We had this wonderful utopian vision of a new home for the mind. What we've reaped isn't cyberspace. It's cyberbia. It's this vast, bland wasteland of vulgar people and trivial ideas and pictures of half-naked starlets. But despite all the uncertainty, has there ever been a more fascinating moment to be alive?

The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the expanses of cyberspace.

Every day huge amounts of information break off like icebergs and melt away. What worries me is that much information in electronic form is never reduced to paper. Some people have described this as being on the edge of a digital Dark Age and fear we may commit a massive act of amnesia.

I don't think information overload is a function of the volume of information. It's a derivative of the volume of information plus the sense-making tools you have.

The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present