Imagine a forum with ubersimple and ubernice pastel colors, where threads don’t involve ‘cuz’, sexual or highly emotional implications, and they lack smileys and other thingummyjigs of the glittery subspecies. And if you think you’ve reached messageboard heaven, you are wrong: it’s even better than that, and it’s Barbelith.
com, a forum with several areas of interest, most of which have something to do with the arts, humanities, social sciences and related disciplines. Since there are lots of forums on each of these repartitions, you can join high-brows and scholars in their discussions, read their papers, follow their links and engage –or assist to a great discussion—, or take a look at the world from a slightly more mundane perspective by taking a look at what’s going in ‘The Spectacle’ area to read mostly critiques and reviews of books, movies, CDs, plays, art shows and the like. If you enjoy discovering new art projects and the artistic exploration of new media and the like, do spare some time reading these treads and following the links provided by the contributors to learn about exciting and creative things that are popping up over the world. Reading the site is of course free to anyone who cares to do so (an increasing number of people are; you might as well rush in order to claim you were one of the early users of the site), but you need to send in an application mail to the address below; they do this in order to check that the person exists, and not to screen who you are, as no questions will get asked during the registration process. If you are familiarized with projects like The Well, you’ll find that Barbelith clearly takes after it, only it’s free and does not insist so much on stating one’s full name. 
