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Mon. Mar 28, 2005

Five Questions Wrapup

Well, I think the circle of the Five Questions meme is now pretty complete for me. Zack started it, and the last of his five questions (“Why haven’t we met when our public addresses are less than 2 miles apart?”) is no longer valid. Some people are more pleasant in writing than they are in person, and Zack felt he had to find that out for himself. So we contributed seven or eight dollars to the nearby Latte Makers Guild, and spent an hour talking face to face.

That’ll teach him.

Of the five people who foolishly signed up to be questioned by me, four have survived the ordeal, and one is AWOL. And I wanted to both link to their answers, and quote a common tone that I found interesting:

phaTTboi: “Ugh, politics… My general impression of the impact of weblogs on the recent U.S. election cycle, or on political discourse in general, is that they are about as useful as bucket brigades in fighting fires in skyscrapers.”

Adrian: “I found the whole thing very depressing. The bloggers/web-surfers struck me, for the most part, as being at a different intellectual level to the average Joe in the local bar. they did a great job of spreading the word to those that had already heard it but made very little difference in reality.”

Paul: “I thought that the people doing these things were actually a new type of political person: the militant independent (just like me) [...] I believed that these new bloggers were a new breed, but the election just exposed them as typical Republicans with the refreshing hint of a Personality Cult. In fact, I now view them the same way I viewed the media and those opinion people right after Sept. 11th.”

Noah: “I’d love nothing more than to believe weblogs will help usher in a golden new age of democratic discourse, a vast exchange of reasoned ideas across a well-informed populace that really has the best interests of their fellow citizens at heart. I’d also love to believe that Ed McMahon will come to my door this afternoon and hand me a check for ten million dollars.” Doh! The page from which that was linked is now sorta-404 as Noah is “taking a break for awhile.”

And speaking of archive difficulties, we have Contestant Number Five, the one whose digital dog ate his blog homework, Jim. That’s not a specific link to a specific article or story. Homey don’t play dat. At JimFormation, you just have to go see what’s on the front page until it rolls off into a cold dark place where unloved creations go to wither before they die a painful screaming death.

Today at JimFormation, it he says he’s “sick … Very, very sick.”

You can add your own punch line to that.

Later: Jim has handed in his homework. Complete with a permalink!