Not long ago I hurried to the airport, heading to deliver a client presentation the next morning. While in the airport lounge I got one of those sinking feelings everyone is familiar with and, indeed, had left my laptop power cord right where it belonged, plugged in to my office power outlet.

My only recourse was to have one of my colleagues FedEx it to me for earliest next day delivery and assume my laptop battery and back up I carry would suffice and we could count on the reliability of overnight delivery.

That's exactly what happened.

Since the presentation was in a hotel meeting room, I alerted the hotel staff, and almost exactly at 8:30 a bellman quietly opened the door while I was speaking and handed me the box. I opened it, plugged in the cord and kept on speaking as if there had been no interruption. Heck, I undoubtedly still had several hours of battery time to spare.

And, the connection is?

It wasn't all that long ago Federal Express was the "average" business school thesis of Fred Smith. Now, the logistically daunting worldwide service borders on the mundane. While I had a bit of anxiety about my forgetfulness, my experience with FedEx (and, to be fair, DHL, Airborne, UPS and most companies in this space) told me not to worry about their ability to get something to me early the next morning.

When first launched, such deliveries were for the very special document or package. Now, overnight deliveries are ubiquitous and simply a way of life and rarely given a second thought.

I don't think it a s-t-r-e-t-c-h to view the internet in similar ways.

First of all, it strikes me as beyond unlikely we can envision all the different ways and paths in which the web will evolve.

We persist in treating it as a NEW MEDIUM, which must be monetized by a host of not quite right and evolving metrics which attempt to describe new (in some cases) yet, in large part, duplicate audiences. Our sights are not set boldly enough.

Think back 50 years ago (for those who can) - how do you think advertisers reacted when television sales representatives first approached them with miniscule audiences of "Households Using Televison?" Now, the penetration of TV sets is virtually 100%, yet the audiences those TV's reach are fragmented in ways that still surprise me. And, that doesn't even take in to consideration the engagement (another evolving notion!) of the medium.

So, how should we look at the internet?

Think electricity. Would you call electricity a medium? It is virtually ubiquitous, powers just about all of the tools of industrial democracy and we cannot imagine life without it?!!

How do you react when lightning strikes and there's a power outage for just a few hours during a storm? What do you do after the few candles you scramble to find are exhausted and the batteries to the two flashlights in that one drawer in your home which is the catch-all for all those rarely used gadgets and gizmos which you refuse to throw away are depleted?

It ain't pretty.

I believe the internet will be much bigger than electricity... MUCH!

If we continue to view it as a fast evolving niche medium which is sorta, maybe cannibalizing our core product and sell it as an added value upsell to the print mothership by merely leveraging existing relationships, we are in very real trouble. Some suggest we are there already.

So, think of the internet as the ultimate community utility. It WILL have 100% penetration...always be on and connected unless disabled or on "hibernate"...sensitive to our evolving wants and desires...breaking local news (from traffic jams and nearby crimes in progress, weather, to school lunches and city council decisions and their impact)...information...entertainment...education... (incidentally, those are very likely connected!)...and, something which will truly incapacitate us (at a top level functional level, but also deeper and emotionally) if and when we are involuntarily forced to go without for even brief periods of time.

Just like matter-of-factly relied upon FedEx to bail me out of a situation in which I fouled up, our society will come to rely on the internet for all types of news and information, but also as a connection to the fabric of our being. Perhaps that sounds like pure science fiction, but believe it...

If you accept any of that vision, then newspapers must aim HIGHER!

Just trying to out search Google or out monster Monster should not be our primary focus. Both of those directions are worth resource allocation as we figure out the financial model, but if we're not capitalizing on the 100's and 1000's of humans in our organizations to increase the already very reliable and trustworthy audience connection we have, then we have sorely missed the biggest opportunity this "medium" has ever had and we should resign ourselves to managing a declining asset.

Belden, for one, is NOT ready for such a scenario. We're putting on our shades (and, by the way, building the research tools to best understand this evolution) since the future IS so bright. Won't you join us?!!