Dear Antiseptic,
it is indeed a fact that most people become more conservative as they age. I hold on to the other fact, however, that some people resist!

Rules are not only "meant" to be broken, it is vital that they are!

It's great that we're starting to get down and dirty on values. Like in RL, it takes a while for the sound and fury to subside.

For mine, very few people change, although some of the feint hearted give up. Revolutionaries are still looking for the next revolution, even on their deathbed ("more light"), and counter-revolutionaries (aka conservatives) have their fire hoses always at the ready, even if they can barely hold it with their arthritic claws.

OLO is after all, about OPINION- conjecture about what is, was, or possibly may be, based on less than complete information. Given incomplete data, we all draw a line of best fit that best fits our particular prejudice- the glass is half empty, or full, or has been taken away by a bartender worried about the liquor laws.

But, apart from the few (some of whom have been named) who have found that OLO can be used as the cyber-graffiti wall from the dreams of their pimply youth, most OLO-ers are searching, in their own way, for a coherent narrative- for images, visions, facts, data and views that will help them trace their particular arc. Just blurting stuff from top-of-mind is pretty useless, except for erstwhile pimply cyber-graffiti-ists and op-pollsters.

OLO is a cyber-community in search of a culture, but constrained by the reality that even bits need bobs. Rupert is presently experimenting with paywalls- and even he can only get 100,000 eyeballs onto an iPad.

(continued...)

.... (as I was saying)

Information wants to be free, as Gerry Garcia once famously said. So much for information, but what about opinion and advice? My considered opinion- based on a career of both charging for, and paying for such stuff, is that OLO has a great opportunity to be the wellspring and focus of revolutionary change- so long as the "considered" outweigh the "cyber-graffiti-ists". Crikey and ABC/Drum are like Wool/Coles- huge flux of undifferentiated bloggers. OLO can do great things if ideas can transcend economics.

The Medicis did it- so why can't we? Back in the good 'ol days, lots of nerds got rich on voluntary subscriptions because their product was great- which meant that people self-evaluated whether they could pay to play. OLO can do that- you've just got to keep economics front of mind. I can afford to pay- heck, I pay Alan Kohler and Crikey- but I'll never think that the considered opinion of a pauper is worth less than the pompous utterances of a prince- and I'm sure that most OLO-ers agree.

Graham- give us a budget target- I'm sure that we can meet it. So long as Medici-house rules continue to prevail.

Hi Jedimaster,
Just as an aside ... one of the things I enjoyed most about being ed of OLO was giving complete unknown authors a go. In fact I got quite a kick out of it ... Susan P

Absolutely, Susan!

I get tired of scanning "the media" (bits, photons and pulp) hearing, seeing, viewing the same "opinion celebrities". I figured out what was going on a few weeks ago when I went into ABC Ultimo for an interview- the old guy at the counter had a bunch of visitor labels out of central casting- the usual suspects. Why, I wondered, does that guy from the humungous financial company always get asked to opine on matters global? And why is that woman with the very familiar face going into interview booth 2 always asked to review books by pop authors. Because they're cheap and safe, and cheap because they're safe. I could write their lines. But on a tight budget with a tight-assed board of management, they're the "go-to" personalities.

The recent "Festival of Dangerous Ideas" in Sydney was about as dangerous as a pond of goldfish or a pack of Shi-Tzus.

But even idea-bubbles and snarls of OLO-piranhas and old media-starved mongrels can be easily dismissed a so-much insignificant sound and fury unless they have some summation and co-ordination. As an unreconstructed mid-century modernist, I have little time for flakey po-mo's who oxymoronically believe that coherent action will be an emergent property of a collection of far-from-equilibrium rantings. A thousand flowers must bloom, but only the best seeds will be harvested.

It's the harvesting that we must focus on as our point of differentiation. Maybe I'm steeped in Hegelian dialectics rather than stooping to Hayekian diatribe. Synthesised ideas, forged in OLO's cyber-furnace are needed, rather than the synthetic sound-bites of the strutters and fretters of Q&A who, by plasma, light the way for fools to dusty beds. TV or not TV.

Aye! Today! There is is the sleep of reason. The rubber of a thousand perchanced dreams of outrageous hair-do's. And having rubbed, the hand moves on....

TS Eliot would have been proud Jed. "The hand that having rubbed, moves on". I'm also a modernist, and I think OLO should have a great future.

Eliot subscribed to a sort of Jungianism, which is in a sense what Web 2.0 is about. Except it is not a subconscious, but a conscious, nevertheless it is collective.

The trick is how to make this work in our context without exhibiting signs of madness (which our competitors in the early days, like the Indy sites, most definitely did).

Ideas are definitely welcome if the above makes sense to you.