Food for thought to kick off 2007

I read Mark Evan's New Year post with great amusement. I have a few questions I would love to have answers to.

• Is Google a great proxy for the demise of modern civilization? Search for an image of a stone (as I had to for my son's project) and you not only get the proverbial pebble but pictures of Sharon Stone on the first results page. The same can be said about the word 'Paris'. Enuf said.
  
• I had to learn Shakespeare at school, now my son has to learn Shakespeare at school. William S. is no doubt a great playwright (I loved his plays) but seriously is learning his works really going to make my son any better in the subject of English?
  
• On the subject of education, as we debate furiously in the blogs about the future of newspapers, I found myself spending a couple of days working on a project with my daughter creating a hardcopy newspaper. Is that the same as teaching our children to use a rotary dialer on a telephone?
  
• During the dotcom age, we used to ask users to pay. In Web 2.0, everything seems to be for free. Given PayPerPost and the like, does that mean we are now in the third generation Web 3.0, i.e new business model, we pay our users to use our services?
  
• After 10 years of standards and the brightest brains in the business, why are browsers still incompatible?
  
• If Linux is the successor to Windows? Does that make the vi editor the successor to Notepad?
  
• If Norton slows down my machine to a crawl, is it a virus?
  
• If you change your website everyday, is it a blog?