The Wall Street Journal-20080128-Technology -A Special Report-- Editor-s Note

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Technology (A Special Report); Editor's Note

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TEN YEARS AGO, could you have imagined being able to hook into the Internet anytime, anywhere? Could you have imagined looking up information in an online encyclopedia that anybody can edit? Could you have imagined such a thing as YouTube?

Now ask yourself: Can you imagine what you'll be able to do 10 years from now?

Our cover story does some of the imagining for you. It offers a glimpse of how technology might change our lives in the coming decade -- the way we shop and play, how we learn and socialize. It aims to present a vision that is broad as well as narrow, picturing both the tools we'll use and how we'll use them.

Just as with our previous soothsaying effort 10 years ago, some of these predictions will no doubt be right on target -- and some will be laughably misguided. We will overestimate the impact of some technologies while underestimating the impact of others.

And we will, again, fall short when it comes to the most difficult part of peering into the future: trying to think of those technologies that most of us can't even imagine today.