Agora's elevator pitch

Every advance in communications technology brings about a new literary form.

The web is an advance in communications technology

The new literary forms have not settled down yet.

Examples of new forms are wikis, search engines, ranking sites, social networks, blogs, newsgroups, e-mails, homepages, and mailing lists.

Spam is also a new form. There has never before been a malevolent literary form. It plagues all the above forms. It might be better described as a parasitic meta-form. It must be dealt with by concepts of reputation.

None of these new forms looks like a final form. They will all be improved upon.

It might be possible to make a new form by examining all the features of these forms, and combining them. In the process new features may become obvious by their absence in the space of known features.

For instance why should threads be a tree rather than a DAG or general graph?

Why should a post not be able to become an ancestor of an earlier post?

I intend to attempt to construct a new form.

I am going to call it Agora, after the market place in Ancient Athens where the philosophers once debated.