I wanted to share with you a video that was published today on TED.com. It’s a talk given by Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired and well known author of many books on biology, business, technology and the internet.

Mr. Kelly talked about the fact that the world wide web we know today is only 5,000 days old. He describes how it was impossible to imagine the current day web back then, and also that we are unable to image what it will evolve into over the next 5,000 days.

Instead of me trying to describe what’s in this talk, why don’t you view it yourself? In less than 20 minutes you’ll get a birds eye view of the development of the web, looking back 5,000 days and 5,000 days into the future.

The OpenX weblog today posted a message about my community contributions. It was in response to the fact that it is exactly 4 years ago that I joined the OpenX community forum, and also that I recently posted my 2000th reply on that forum. Apparently, that event did not go unnoticed. The blog post also mentions my recent step to become a full time consultant, which was possible in a major way to the OpenX related projects I frequently do.

I’m very proud about this recognition of my work in the OpenX community and the comments by a key OpenX people that appeared on the blog.

If you’ve read the book “The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, you know what this is about. In the book, a computer computes the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything”. It takes a few million years, and when it’s done the answer turns out to be: 42. This immediately presents a new problem. Although the answer is crystal clear, it doesn’t seem to be of much use. Without the proper question, it appears to be worthless. So the same computer is asked if it can provide the question to the question that has 42 as the answer. The computer thinks for a while and then it says: yes, I can do it, but it’s tricky. It may take a while.

For me, personally, this is much more simple. There is a question to which I can reply: 42. That question is: “At what age are you going to start your own full time business?”. Today I turn 42, that magical age, and during this next year I intend to quit my job and start my own consulting firm.