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There's just no way to think about the future and get it right. The other night we were all watching "Back to the Future, Part 2" for about the 900th time. I got a chuckle out of the "Surf Vietnam" poster on a wall in 2015 Hill Valley. In the 1980s, when the film was made, the idea of tourism in Vietnam was about as futuristic as flying cars and hoverboards. Somehow I doubt that we'll have flying cars or hoverboards in the next seven years. But Vietnam tourism? Of course. Why not?

Since I got back from my recent trip to Asia I've been armchair-traveling, thinking about how I want to visit Cambodia and Vietnam next time I have a legitimate reason to be in the area (i.e., somebody pays my airfare). Once again Mindy McAdams is ahead of me. She's heading to Vietnam, Cambodia and (of course) Malaysia, and blogging about it.

There is still much grinding poverty in that region, and plenty of casual violation of human rights to criticize, if you want to sit at home and cast stones.

But there's also hope, growth, and a recognition that education and technology are the way to the future.

Cambodia even lets you order your visa electronically and pay the fee with a credit card. In the Open Source spirit, they're asking for volunteers to translate their website into more languages (they already have 25) and they have an official e-visa blog. Angkor Wat has become an international tourist destination.

Just a few years ago, who would have predicted that?

Martin Stabe recaps the ongoing debate about whether simple tools like Dreamweaver -- which no professional journalist is likely to ever use -- have a role in journalism education.

It reminds me a bit of Glenn Hanson requiring his typography students at the University of Illinois to learn the California job case sufficiently to set a paragraph of type. Or Daniel Slotnick making me write a tiny computer program in machine code (binary, not assembler). Waste of time? I don't think so. For a designer, an appreciation of how letterforms physically fit together is an asset you get from touching type, not from listening to a lecture or reading a book.

I don't use Dreamweaver. Never have, never will. But it seems to me to be a fine tool for exploring how information can fit together visually in a hypermedia presentation. In the real world, those students are going to be locked into heinously inflexible content management systems. There will be time for learning about them later. Classroom time should be devoted to illuminating the range of possibilities.

I'd also introduce journalism students to HTML and CSS, by the way -- not because they'll ever need to write HTML on a daily basis, but because they need to know something about the wires holding everything together under the hood. That's why Slotnick had a bunch of liberal-arts majors writing binary code by hand back in the dark ages of computing. I hated that exercise, and I love the fact that I did it.

Disruptive innovations, in the Clayton Christensen model, typically represent a "leap down" rather than an improvement in technology. And sometimes the result might seem to be a toy, beneath serious notice.

Here are some examples: the ASUS EEE ($349 from Amazon.com), the Everex Cloudbook ($399 from Wal-Mart later this month) and the XO from the One Laptop Per Child project, which you can't actually buy but theoretically costs somewhere between $150 and $300.

Toys, all of them. They don't even run Windows and can't run Vista. Their displays are only 800 pixels wide, not enough for most of today's sprawling website designs (particularly news sites). The XO and EEE don't even have hard drives.

But they come with their own set of advantages, starting with ultraportability. Take a look at Mindy McAdams' photos of the XO. Slip one into a backpack and you'll not even notice it's there. They all run Linux, which is virus-free and spyware-free, and highly reliable. They can put the Internet in new hands and new places.

So while the mainstream might consider these insufficient and underpowered, the EEE actually ranked as the "most wished for" computer on Amazon.com this Christmas season. And the best-selling? It was the Nokia N800, currently $231.49, an 800-pixel Linux-powered handheld "toy."

It's no wonder, then, that Microsoft and Intel, which are completely shut out of this phenomenon, are suddenly taking notice. There are reports of Intel trying to torpedo major government buys of XO laptops and Microsoft suddenly deciding Windows XP will live on, after all, as an installable "upgrade" for the XO.

But the disruptive potential of these ultraportable Linux laptops isn't limited to technology companies. Textbook publishing, entertainment broadcasting, record companies and government-controlled mass media all around the world are going to be upended. We've already seen in the United States the beginnings of what widespread Internet access can do to old media. You ain't seen nuthin' yet.

For awhile part of the Sunday morning newspaper-reading ritual at my house has been to dig through the "guy toy" inserts from Lowe's, Home Depot, CompUSA and Best Buy.

Three of those companies are doing pretty well (in fact, Home Depot just opened another store within walking distance of my house). One is doing very poorly: CompUSA, which announced Friday that it's throwing in the towel and will close its stores after the holiday sales.

Oddly enough, there's a lesson in this for newspapers.

CompUSA isn't a technology store. It's specifically a computer store. While it has non-computer electronic entertainment devices, it's not positioned as such in the marketplace.

Moore's Law describes how computers get more powerful over time. A side effect is that for N amount of power, price declines. While computer retailers are desperately trying to maintain prices at 2001 levels by stuffing more power into the box, reasonably powerful computers are relentlessly heading toward a $200 price point for desktops and a $350 price point for laptops.

As the unit prices decline, unit sales at CompUSA haven't been rising to offset that decline. Instead, consumers are finding cheap laptops at an array of new competitors. Walgreen's, a corner drugstore for cryin' out loud, was advertising laptops last week.

Trapped in a business model that assumes $1,000 desktops and $2,500 laptops, CompUSA can't cover its fixed costs and its obligations. And because of the power of its brand, it can't easily segue into selling $2,000 flat-panel HD televisions like Best Buy can.

This is very much the trap that many newspapers have wandered into.

A newspaper isn't a media company -- it's a newspaper company. The core product -- news information -- is no longer rare and expensive. An array of new competitors enter the business. Media consumption is actually growing like mad, but the growth is all in a new kind of media consumption, focused on personal entertainment, practical utility and communing/communicating with others. The powerful brand of the newspaper puts it in a box, and it can't easily segue into the growing space. Revenues decline, obligations mount, trouble follows.

And as CompUSA shuts down its local stores, one more source of advertising revenue for the daily newspaper goes away.

I've been repeating myself a lot lately: "It's not about technology. It's not about technology." Nevertheless, I find myself being drawn back into the technology frequently, and last week I spent a day at the Barcelona Drupalcon, surrounded by a bunch of really smart guys (mostly guys, anyway) half my age.

I was "in the neighborhood" because BDZV, the German federation of newspaper publishers, had asked me to speak at an annual meeting. I hopped a cheap flight to BCN and slipped in a day at the four-day Drupal conference.

If ever you're in doubt about the power of the community-driven open-source development process, I'd encourage you to take in a conference like that one. There were 492 people registered for more than 80 sessions, and all of the sessions were nominated and chosen by the attendees in an open online process in the weeks before the conference (in other words, applying open process to the conference itself).

As you might expect, the hallways were full of high-energy conversations, and many of the developers skipped an evening or two of partying to write code in marathon sessions in apartments and hotels scattered around the city.

I appeared on a panel discussing participative news sites, probably the least technical panel at the whole show, and the room was packed. My panel was organized by our own Ken Rickard, who was involved in half a dozen other presentations through the course of the conference. Ken was vacationing with his wife in Spain and performing, as usual, above and beyond the call of duty.

Online journalism is not a matter of technology, but we need to use technology to do it. Tapping into a global community of thousands of really smart developers is a powerful way to get there.

Presentation notes and videos are being collected at Drupal.org.

In a commentary for the Pew Internet & American Life project, Susannah Fox writes that she's "struck by a phrase repeated a few times: 'good enough' technology."

The phrase actually is a key to understanding disruptive innovation as laid out by Harvard prof Clayton Christensen, and embodied in the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Change.

Truly disruptive technologies tend to enter the environment at the low end, not the high end.

To incumbents, they may at first appear to be a joke. Two examples from the world of database technology serve as examples.

The first is MySQL, a free relational database server that began as a fairly primitive tool.

"Real" database administrators -- the guys with Oracle DBA certifications -- sneered at it. A toy fit only for amateurs, it nevertheless was "good enough" to enable thousands of new Web-based applications (including the software that runs this blog). As it improved, it climbed the ladder of quality and eventually became the data engine behind Google AdSense, a truly disruptive technology.

The second is SQLite, an even more primitive data store -- it doesn't even have a server! This funny little thing is just a C library that can be compiled into any application. It's not worth a damn if you're running a corporate data center, yet it might be "good enough" for some completely new applications where a relational data store was never possible or practical. In Christensen terminology, this is "competing against nonconsumption." It's the tinny little Sony transistor radio in 1955.

So the Mozilla project quietly sticks it into Firefox. And the PHP project quietly sticks it into PHP5. And now Google has used it to create Google Gears, a technology platform that will spawn a whole new breed of Web-based applications that work offline just like they do when you're online, and then sync your data when you reconnect.

This is world-changing stuff. And it begins not by building the high-end, be-all, end-all super-performing solution to all possible problems, but rather at the low end. "Good enough" to solve one new problem at a time.

I have long believed that the mind is not to be found between the ears, but rather in the sum of our interactions with our environment. In a sense, we are what we do and who we know (so be careful what you do and who you know).

Technology extends and expands our reach, and therefore our minds. Tools shape the user. Marshall McLuhan famously said the media are an extension of our central nervous systems.

As we plug into the Internet, we no longer have to know facts, as facts are easily retrievable. How many feet in a mile? Einstein didn't bother remembering; he would look it up. Google now tells us: "feet per mile" instantly answers "1 mile = 5 280 feet." How many dollars is 1,645 baht? What is masala thosai?

The Telegraph reports on a British study claiming that technology is dumbing down the nation's brain power, and that "As many as a third of those surveyed under the age of 30 were unable to recall their home telephone number without resorting to their mobile phones or to notes. "

Well, I'm not under 30 and I have that "problem." My phone lets me point and click and I'm perfectly happy with that. I have no desire to fill my head with phone numbers any more than I want to learn IP addresses, other than "there's no place like 127.0.0.1."

I don't believe technology is subtracting from our ability to remember. I think it's radically adding to our ability to know, and the important application of our brainpower is not in the direction of memory, but of understanding.