Perhaps OLO and other blogs can take some credit for newpapers going online and interactive. That's a pretty big change in the last decade. I couldn't give a damn about religion but I'm interested in energy and climate issues. Re which OLO is noted for giving a lot of time to GW deniers or quibblers. To be fair it has also pricked some green fantasies such as the limits of wind power.

I wonder however if a lot a change is going unnoticed. A physical principle (le Chatelier) is that systems tend to absorb shocks. For example if you put pressure on steam some of it condenses to ease the pressure. Thus motorists responded to oil price shocks by driving less. The question is whether the round of shocks in the next decade will be as easy to absorb as the last lot. If not tumultuous change could be on the way.

Graham Young says:

".... OLO was first and foremost an eDemocracy initiative.
.
.

The potential that we saw in the Internet was to make it easier for voters to talk to each other and to those who form, influence and administer policy, as well as to politicians. We thought that it would provide a venue where the whole resources of the community could be brought to bear on common problems when and as they arose. We thought it could add to social capital by increasing civility and understanding.

It hasn’t done that over the last ten years, and my fear is that in the next ten it will actually tend to raise global "nervous anxiety" by increasing the speed of dissemination of ideas and undermining the institutions, like newspapers, that used to provide checks on what found its way into the public domain."

Give it time Graham. There is a thing called inertia, the tendency for a body at rest or in motion to continue in that state unless acted upon by an external force. The body politic is, perhaps, no exception to this law.

Earlier in the article Graham said:

".... But what I do think we will see in the next ten years is the continuing growth of Independents. This will be as a result of the decline in the standard of candidate selected by the major parties, as well as the network opportunities offered by the Internet. ...."

Surely its important to explore the reasons for the decline in the standard of candidates endorsed by the major parties, as the prognosticated emergence of more independents is not an automatic guarantee, in itself, of better representation?

I think I detect some undue pessimism in Graham's expressed fears of OLO "[raising] global 'nervous anxiety' by increasing speed of dissemination ...". That doesn't seem to be what Twitter, which OLO is now on, promotes.

Perhaps if OLO was also able to run articles under the userID anonimity of registered users, conditional upon such articles otherwise meeting necessary standards, there might come to be an added dimension to OLO eDemocracy.

Graham ,Fair go,
"Modern Societies run on Trust ".

Half the world was stupid enough to believe the lies that emanated from our trustworthy [yeah right] Intelligence Sources and allies in the Middle East and our corrupted politicians.
These lies plunged Iraq into a Holocaust that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraquis,men ,women and children and also thousands of our soldiers that were told that Sadam had to go along with his weapons of Mass Destruction.

Deception by your trustworthy politicians of the West's citizens led to horrific results.

Our top bankers and economists sit at the tables of our esteemed democratically elected politicians nodding their heads .

Do your give them your trust ?

I will have a look at the thoughts of GetUp and feel quite comfortable about it.

OLO is to be congratulated for airing a truely diverse range of opinion - or at least sufficiently diverse that at one point the left-green bloc complained (unjustly) that it was biased. Not all the articles were in line with the green-PC orthodoxy! Well down OLO!

Graham, us wheat cockies felt there was something wrong when our Dalwallinu bank manager supported GET BIG or GET OUT economics now way back in the late 1970s.

The bankers even encouraged reasonably comfortable smallholders to sell out to larger neighbours heavy in debt.

Surprise surprise also, was that while grain prices were still slowly going down, land prices jumped from 35 dollars per acre to 300 dollars within seven years.

As one born in 1921 and going on nine in 1930, I can clearly remember the terrible finish to the Roaring Twenties and the end of terms like Making Hay while the Sun Shines, or the ones more profane like the end of the Rip Sh't or Bust years.

Some oldies now blame John Howard and Costello for encouraging the boom in land prices with profits still low, but certainly Australia was only a tiny portion of a lending mania by Western banks so deadly sure of a better and brighter future.

Though I do enjoy OLO, Graham, the one thing that upsets me is still the tendency for right-wingers to pooh pooh academia, making one wonder sometimes where they get their info' from, which still seems to support a system that has got us into the economic mess we are now in.

Regards, BB, WA.

Curmudgeon, if OLO ran regular pieces arguing that the earth is flat and that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, interspersed rarely with arguments to the contrary, you might think there was some bias involved, too. Unless, of course, the extreme views held by a miniscule minority fit nicely with your political ideology, in which case it would seem perfectly fair and balanced.

Happy anniversary to OLO and all who write and post here.