The Web is a compelling new medium being put to all kinds of uses, by everyone from banks to Cub Scouts to flying saucer cults. That said, it can also be a powerful folly amplifier.

The arrival of television established a mass-media order that dominated the last 50 years. This is a personal media revolution. The distinction between the old order and the new order is very important. Television delivered the world to our living room. In the old media, all we could do was press our noses against the glass and watch.

Graphic designers are idea embalmers, loving undertakers preserving bits of data like to many butterflies pinned to felt in a jewel box.

This new world of personal media - the Web, the Internet and et cetera - not only delivers the world to your living rooms, but everywhere. And we get to answer back. And we're expected to answer back.

We've become more and more interrupt-driven. If you have six tasks to do in an hour, you can't just take 60 minutes and divide and have 10 minutes per task. You have 10 minutes per task minus the time required for context-shifting. That will be the next big challenge: figuring out how to fight the distraction-driven mode we're in and stay focused on one thing long enough to get it done.

Any thinking person is qualified to be a forecaster, and in fact, everybody does it every day.

Every new thing upsets people. We all know someone that has a teenage kid who sits in the room and the television is on, their iPod is on, they have the computer on and at least three other electronic devices going while they're doing their homework. It drives the dad nuts, but he can't complain because the kid's a 4.1 (GPA) student.