Information without a price barrier is essential for the operation of a democratic society. Publicly-funded dailies are one remnant of old-world media that I fully back as solving (partially) this problem.

As we start to rely on the internet, in a non-centralized manner (see NowPublic's coverage of the Boxing Day tsunami as an example of grassroots citizen journalism), it's fairly obvious that newsprint isn't going to keep up with the pace of our world.

Best practices. For many, a four letter word followed by "change." Recently, best practices got full press with standard-compliant HTML and CSS webpages. Presto chango, a one click validator later, and best practices became the norm. Anyone trying to debug an AJAX widget can tell you, the best practices described by the W3C just works. Unfortunately, the same diligence is often ignored in areas outside of HTML, which is a big shame. Best practices evolve, and all areas of a business need to be actively assessing their own procedures for optimization.