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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?

I'm back in the online world after two weeks in which I was not completely offline, but nearly so. I spoke and moderated a session at the Ifra PublishAsia conference in Macao, toured Bangkok's canals, and spent a week on Phuket Island with my wife, where we rode an elephant, paddled through bat-filled caves on tiny islands in the Gulf of Thailand, snorkeled, swam, and somehow managed to avoid sunburn.

The trip home took three days and included five flights and one high-speed trimaran ride, with an evening in Kuala Lumpur where we had a wonderful dinner with Iris Tan and Michael Aeria of The Star.

Right now I feel like I have a head full of cotton, and it may be a bit before I resume my normal media blogging.

I'm back from nearly two weeks on the far side of the world: southeast Asia.

Being a lazy blogger, I sat back and didn't bother blogging from the Ifra citizen media workshop last week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Kevin Anderson and Robb Montgomery were singing, dancing, spinning plates, shooting videos and live-blogging like mad. I took it easy.

After the three-day workshop I took some vacation time for sightseeing in Kuala Lumpur and in Bangkok, Thailand. While I didn't blog, I did shoot photos, seen here on my own gallery:
Malaysia
Thailand

Smaller collections on Flickr:
Kuala Lumpur
Bangkok

And some Flickr photos from the Ifra workshop contributed by others:
IfraKL2007

I haven't posted much lately due to a heavy work/travel schedule ending in several days of vacation in Istanbul. At the moment I'm burning some time in an expat bar near the Sultan Ahmet mosque. My plane leaves at 5 a.m., so I'm closing down the bars and not bothering with a hotel tonight.

So here I am at the junction of Europe and Asia -- literally, the Bosphorus straits -- in a modern city full of wi-fi connections, mobile telephones, and a rapidly increasing standard of living. Satellite TV. Slick new trams. A booming city with a population somewhere between 10 and 15 million people, maybe half again as large as New York.

This is the former Ottoman empire, the former Byzantine empire, a former capital of the Roman empire. Today it is a land with ambitions of sealing the breach between East and West, the Islamic world and the Christian-dominated world, a "joining of the great civilizations" as they say, by becoming a member of the European Union.

It is a place where the burqa and belly dancing coexist, a passionately secular state in an Islamic region. (Mass demonstrations last weekend supported a strong separation of state and religion.) It borders on Greece and Bulgaria on the European side; Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Georgia on the Asian side.

In the background, the Clash are on the entertainment system: "Rocking the Casbah."

Half a dozen blocks away there's a labyrinth of shops all organized by craft: Metal workers. Makers of tools to work metal. Button sellers. Shoe stores.

In a world where information was scarce, it was important to cluster such vendors physically.

That's the past.

The present, as always, is a mix of past and future.

Some of us have the entire World Wide Web at our fingertips through ubiquitous free wi-fi connections. Here in Istanbul we have the Aya Sofia, just around the corner, constructed 532 to 537, common era. We have "honor killings" and we have women delivering the TV news. (Keep in mind that women simply did not anchor U.S. newscasts before 1970.)

The future? It's a place where the gross inequities are narrowed. When information is easily available everywhere, when bandwidth is nearly free, information-based jobs can exist anywhere as well. And jobs that depend on information -- isn't that pretty much most of them? -- are liberated from many of the constraints of geography.

For a few this may mean some pain and loss; for the many, it is a gain. It means a happier and healthier human race.

It has been a good trip. I'll be flying home in a few hours, more optimistic than I've felt in quite awhile.

I've been very quiet lately as I rushed to get some real work done against a hard deadline. My friends in colder climates will appreciate the sacrifice I made in spending some time in Florida. MyClaySun.com launches later this week and it seems to be coming together nicely, and the staff has labeled Jonathan Bennett, the site's community content coordinator fresh out of University of South Carolina, as "our very enthusiastic," which is somewhat more restrained than the sign I saw on his door last week, which I think read "Captain Awesome" or something like that.

Today I'm in Paris downing caffeine and trying to reset my bioclock. Regardless of how many times I crawl in and out of airplanes -- and I do that a lot these days -- there's something magic about snoozing in front of a TV screen for a few hours and waking up as you descend from the clouds in a land that once was weeks, if not months distant. I'm attending a World Press Freedom Committee affair for the next couple of days, then taking a cheapo discount flight to Prague for a dose of that city's magic.

It always happens this way, and it's always my own darn fault: travel comes in unreasonable bursts.

I've done little blogging lately because I've been on the road, and I rarely have the combination of quiet thinking time and a good Internet connection that I need to construct a meaningful blog post.

So far this year I've been in Los Angeles, Memphis, St. Petersburg (Florida, not the colder one) and now Jacksonville, where I'm doing some work with one of our newspapers that I'll be able to discuss once the project is made public.

Sunday I leave for Las Vegas, which is -- well, I'll be generous and say it's just not one of my favorite cities. I understand that a lot of people love it, but it's not my thing. Then I'm off to Bakersfield and Los Angeles again. Then Macon for a day.

But I'm not looking for sympathy (and won't get any) because after a few days at home I'm off to Europe, where I'll speak in Paris. To offset Las Vegas not being one of my favorite places I'm indulging myself with some time off: a long weekend in Prague, which is one of my favorite places and is everything Vegas is not: genuine, cultured, utterly beautiful. Worth it all.

Not long ago someone suggested I might be an isolationist, based on something I had written about the fading role of world and national news and the rise of hyperlocalism in newspapers.

I took my wife and my youngest daughter to the airport Monday, where they turned a hundred thousand of my frequent-flier miles into a trip to Europe. We will spend our Christmas holiday separated by thousands of miles because we believe it's that important for young people to get a broader view of the world than they can get by staying home.

Except for a weekend in Canada, I didn't travel internationally until I was over 40. Now I can't get enough of it, and everyone in my family is collecting visa stamps in their passports.

One of my great frustrations is that, like most Americans, I can't carry on a conversation in any language other than English. I had to turn down a potential gig in Madrid the other day because my Castellano is fit only for ordering una cerveza, por favor. My relationship with half a dozen other languages is similar.

There is, however, an isolationist streak in American culture, and when it collides with the reality of a rapidly shrinking world the results can be ugly. You can see that in the anti-Hispanic immigration backlash being exploited by the crass TV demagogue Lou Dobbs, but equally in the ignorant arrogance that has led to the bloody chaos in Iraq and the downfall of America as a world leader. I don't want my kids to grow up so handicapped.

So I'm a bit of an internationalist. But at the same time I recognize that we all live simultaneously in multiple worlds.

I have a work world, a family world, a neighborhood world, a number of worlds of special interests, and in each of those worlds I have different needs for current and persistent information, connections, and commercial interaction. Some of those worlds are hyperlocal; others may be hyperspecialized.

The problem faced by "general" news organizations is that they fit poorly into a matrix of specialization. American newspapers in particular are poorly suited to specialization. They evolved in an information economy (and entertainment economy) of scarcity. In the 19th century a daily printed product was an exciting breakthrough in bandwidth; in the 21st it's a puny little trickle.

Yet most American newspapers continue to operate on the omnibus model, dumping onto the doorstep (or, more often, throwing into the driveway) a mashup of local, regional, national and global news, sports and business coverage. It is a stew suited to an earlier era, one that is consumed not to satisfy needs but rather to satisfy a fading habit.

I believe American newspapers need a complete restructuring of journalism priorities and processes. When I advocate hyperlocalism, it's not because I lack interest in global topics; it's that I believe newspapers must specialize to survive.

The local and hyperlocal spaces in which we all live are full of unmet and poorly met needs in the areas of information and connectivity/communications. Those areas constitute opportunities. Who will focus their resources on them?