Dear Q & A,

All The Best...

You shall be missed on OLO,
I for one hope that eventually
you will come back to posting,
even occasionally - would be good.

Anyway, here's wishing you and yours,
everything that's beautiful in life.

Take care,

OLO is certainly an interesting place. If the articles and comments were placed in a time capsule and opened in the Year 2070 how would our thoughts and opinions stand up to the test of time.

The topics that are controversial or divided now may all be old hat in 2070. Would we know the absolute truth about AGW/GW, GM food etc. Did we revert to renewable energy and say NO to more fossil fuelled power?

Do we spend too much time on OLO at the risk of losing quality time in the real world, or is the Internet one part of the modern real world and a different way to interact. I am not sure about that one yet. Dealing and interacting with people face to face is important to our social wellbeing.

Reading the opinions of people and why they think the way they do can be enlightening and there are a number of posters who have mae me stop and think about various issues.

The only thing that I don't like about OLO is it is very anti-female at times but I guess that can be ignored. It is sad to see some people so affected by their own personal circumstances that they cannot see the wood for the trees or have empathy for a different group of people or other's experiences. But that is life I guess. We all bring different experiences and ideas to OLO and that is what makes it so interesting.

Very interesting Pelican. What WILL people make of OLO in fifty or so years time? I wonder.

It raises another concern – just how permanent is the OLO archive? Will it all still be around for viewing in a few decades?

If OLO was to fold for whatever reason, would it all be lost into the ether?

Susan, can you shed any light on this?

Toodle pip Q&A

And thank you for your words of wisdom. They've been a valuable source of information to many.

As for the "deny and delay" brigade, well, "let them eat cake!"

See ya in the spring!

Hasta la vista.

My guess Ludwig, would be that were OLO to fold, it would be stored on the pandora archives if it isn't already.

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/

A great thing about OLO is that it gives a good opportunity to anybody to raise issues of importance to them that they often don't get the opportunity to put in everyday life. To that end, the anonymity OLO provides is a godsend. Can you imagine raising some very intensely political issue in everyday suburban life? I know many ordinary people who are very clued up and wise in their own lives (borne out of their own experiences), but who have little opportunity to make their views known to others. Blogs like OLO start to bridge that gap.

Another great thing, is the chance to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, shoot the odd sacred cow or fill some ideas space that others generally haven't before. What are some alternative ways of thinking that bypass problems before they occur, for example?

Good ideas will be absorbed and eventually expanded on, bad ideas will either be ignored or hung, dried and quartered and in-between ideas will have the good bits extracted from them and kept, the bad bits being discarded. Any way you look at it, it's good. This occurs only because of the forum's greatest strength: its genuine diversity of opinion.

Finally, blogs like this are necessary as they are the forerunners of more general and widespread community debates I hope we will be having in future.