why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment - even discussion - we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience." Dan Taylor explains Shownar from the BBC's perspective

"Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it."

Some interesting visualisations of the way forum threads on dpreview - which has nested threads in posts - grow and progress. Interesting for the patterns it throws up, and somewhat useful, if only for rough, high-level analysis.

"This is something I said about Spore a while back, actually. I thought Spore could be a little like what Understanding Comics is to Comics. As in something from the form which uses the form to explain the form." Oh, I like that as an idea. He can be a smart one at times, that Gillen.

Leigh Alexander publishes some conversations about Braid, and opens up the floor. Some good discussion here.

"Cruciforum is a very simple web forum, designed to make it really easy to add a discussion forum to a website." Rather fun: no accounts, no administration, all static HTML, and all from one file. Feels entertainingly old-school.

"I hate the term User Generated Content... I consider it a pejorative that reveals a lot about the person saying it. It makes members of your site feel like dutiful robots, crapping content that you convert into cash." Great article!

Awesome resource if you're even remotely into curry - lots of recipes from inside (UK) curry houses, lots of discussion on how to make the best base, lots of recipes. Yum.

Clay Shirky's wiki for discussion pattern languages of moderation.