The commercial web is now a teenager-it's been fifteen short years since Marc Andreessen released the Mosaic browser. To put this in perspective, fifteen years after television's birth, the contours of the new medium were just emerging.

Who would have thought that this revolutionary new phenomenon might one day become just another application on a vast web of computers. In the first fifteen years of the Web the business models driving the Internet economy have exploded at the rate of 1 web year equals about 5 TV years. So what do the next 10 years hold for us. Listen to Kevin Kelly as he forecasts his vision of Web 10.0

Have you ever thought "I wish I could do that again" You think with the benefit of hindsight you would do it perfectly next time. But a slight change here leads to a different result there and it all becomes very complicated or at least a new path that you soon realise your previous experience did not prepare you for. 

In fact every venture in life is an adventure. it is unique even if you knew that doing B will lead to a better result than doing A because you will then arrive at D instead  of C (which is where you would have been if you had done A) but now you have a new set of consequences that your previous experience did not prepare you for.

What is the moral to that bon mot?

Prehaps it means don't stress about whether you have the expertise to do a task well or not - just do it. Because whatever the result, good bad or indifferent it will be the same but different if you do nothing or do something else or if you could magically do it again.

Every action or no action leads to a result - doing nothing may just get you more of the same as before but that is a decision and you have to live with the result and its consequences.

If you want a different result to the usual one, then obviously you have to do something different in the first place to change the course you are following. Don't worry about the result because you can change that by doing something else. That's life - but trying to avoid bad results by doing nothing, that's .........

Anyway this train of thought started because I found the following short film, I hope you find it as thought provoking as I did.

It happened again today!

Three times. That's almost a good day.

It's like they lay in wait and pounce when I walk through the door. They thrust, I parry. One with the left, I block, one from the right, I duck. And then they get me, right where it hurts.

"I want a pretty web site! It must be at least as beautiful as the Cistern Chappell and definitely better than my friend's"  or their competitor or some giant organisation with a huge  IT and graphic arts department.

In exasperation I blurt out "I wish I had 50 clients like you"

That stops them, after all the arguing they can't believe it. "Why?" they ask.

"Because I've got 500 that's why!"

I used to lay awake on my desk wondering why? Why would someone want to invest thousands into creating a masterpiece that people will only visit once (or twice) and stay for an average of 1.34 minutes?

Haven't they ever been to Amazon.com? No one ever accused Amazon of being beautiful but I would swap my house for 1% of their daily sales.

What makes Amazon work?

Just one example, the book was probably written 12 months ago, it is almost certainly out of date and if not now, it will be by the time I get it. If I add it to my wish list I will get it in about 2010; but I need inspiration today.

Ah, but the reviews are fresh and full of great ideas. If I need to know something and I read all the reviews I will have a pretty good précis of all the best ideas in the book. As a result, sometimes I even jump the wish list queue and buy it immediately. And of course, it's crazy to order just one book so I add the top three from my wish list to keep it company on the long journey to the antipodes. No wonder I'm always broke.

How many pretty web sites do that to you? If you know one, please add it to the comments.