The forums are a waste of the small amount of space and (probably) bandwidth they consume - brief outbursts reminiscent on the comments on Youtube.
The interesting idea can be seen when one enters the name of an author in the "Map of Literature" searchbox, and is given a cloud of other authors name, not just telling you which the site recommend that you try reading the work of, but how much confidence the site has in the recommendation.
One sees the names wander across the screen and then settle down, oscillating slightly, the close the name of a new author being to that of the name you entered, which will be seen in the center of the screen, the more likely you are to like that other author - or at least so the developer of the system claims.
A site on which one can publish one's fiction. The social networking aspect of the site seems to be limited to the posting of reviews.
Having not yet registered an account on this site, I don't know whether or not one can screen the reviews of one's stories. As each story page seems to link to a page of reviews of the story appearing on that page, if the answer to this question is "no", then what one would have, in effect, would be a guestbook that one couldn't moderate, with all of the possibilities for abuse that creates.
I don't know that's the case, but I also don't know that's not the case, so I'll set up that account in a few days and learn more. I just didn't want somebody blindly stumbling into trouble, thinking that I had checked out something that I hadn't, yet.
Free e-books at the University of Michigan, with one annoying feature - almost everything is reached by search, not by menu, which might be how some librarians approach libraries, but not really how anybody else does. Such a design eliminates the digital analog of the experience of walking into the stacks and just running into a book.
Still, it is free reading and that is always of interest.
