This ambitious study documents the underlying features which link the civilizations of the Mediterranean - Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan and Roman - and the Iron Age cultures of central Europe.

Offering challenging views on population movement, diffusion, trade, social structure and spatial organization, it deals with the gradual process which culminated in the Roman Empire.

A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology
Within the social sciences and the humanities, it is now widely accepted that the role of language in social life cannot be understood without a study of the interface between linguistic forms and the cultural practices that they help constitute. Linguistic anthropologists have been at the forefront of such a study for decades.A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology continues in the same tradition by providing a series of in-depth explorations of key concepts and approaches by some of the scholars whose work constitutes the theoretical and methodological foundations of the contemporary study of language as culture.

Well, here we go.
I need your opinion on whether we need the following features at Englishtips:
BLOGS (every user gets a blog hosted at Englishtips where s/he can blog )
Dangers: Can become a mess or tricky in the long run, as users may want to start sharing links at their own blogs instead of ET :)
SOCIAL NETWORK (registered users can create/join groups, become friends with each other, comment in each other's profiles, etc etc)
Sounds very interesting for me, as this can help us build even stronger communities grouped by common interest.
Please tell us what you think (POLL INSIDE!)
COMMENTS IN BOTH RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH ARE WELCOME!

Julian: A Christmas Story - a  review from The Guardian (U.K):

It's 2176 and, following a global technological collapse, the United States has reverted to a pre-electronic age of limited scientific understanding and Puritan social mores. The Sixty States of the Union are ruled by a coalition, the Church of the Dominion, headed by the autocratic President Deklan Comstock. The Union comprises three social groups: the aristos; the "leasing class" of tradesmen; and indentured labourers. Julian tells the rites-of-passage story of low-born Adam Hazzard and his friendship with the nephew of the president, the aristo Julian Comstock, relating how Adam's social conditioning is subtly undermined by Julian's heretical ideas: Darwinism, Einsteinism and DNA. The first-person narrative maintains an uneasy balance between reverence for the status quo and a fearful acknowledgment of the wonders of the past, while the text eschews sensationalism in favour of a thoughtful account of personal change and a skilled evocation of a feudal future.

As Robert J. Sawyer says of Wilson in the introduction to this fine novella, "He's sui generis: a hard-SF writer with the soul of a poet."