It's well known that I am rather skeptical about the power of the internet to democratize discourse. The production model so far is to close to print publication and television. Whoever has the bigger wallet will be better heard. And the same theological hierarchy: the author-god produces the material that is consumed by the reader. Even Web 2.0 (i.e. blogs, Wikipedia, etc.) follows this model.

The impetus behind Wikipedia is nice, but truthfully, only a small majority of visitors actually contribute anything to it. And message boards are just ghettos where similarly narrow-minded morons congregate (e.g., whatever was happening at foetry.com and whatever conservative/GOP message boards).