Blog & Forum
In the abstract, and maybe in the concrete, a forum might be superior. The forums I’m make topic organization easy to navigate; historical contributions are less ephemeral; and just the term ‘forum’ is more inviting because it implies community.
One could imagine given the topic areas of the blog that a forum ala ND2.0 would have topics such as:
forum FAQ
web 2.0-3.0
semiotics
photography
travel
psychology
internet life
and whatever else.
Visually forums are utilitarian, but, this provides topic organization. RSS can be rendered at topic and sub-topic levels.
Here’s the kicker: on a blog, even if it hasn’t evoked much community, it remains somewhat active if there are several postings a week. On a forum–at our blog’s level of activity–it would appear dead in the water. And, such a forum still would serve our purpose, but to the experienced outsider, it would “look” dead.
Let’s suppose that–nevertheless–this would be where a forum began at, and, quickly, it would gain say 25 members, each who would post on a average once a week. Community around topics begins to grow.
Presumably, before that happened, we’d have designed the political structure, moderation, and, the basic rules of the road, and also would have adapted ways to defeat forum spam, and, made copyright policies.
Most important of all, we would have developed contingency plans for dealing with the administrative labor required to police and mentor a quickly growing forum.
Finally, all of this would figure into a cost model due to the bandwidth impact of unpredictable growth. Yes, some of these factors also figure into the growth of participant community on a blog.
I visualize a blog as a house, and a forum as a neighborhood.
One could imagine given the topic areas of the blog that a forum ala ND2.0 would have topics such as:
forum FAQ
web 2.0-3.0
semiotics
photography
travel
psychology
internet life
and whatever else.
Visually forums are utilitarian, but, this provides topic organization. RSS can be rendered at topic and sub-topic levels.
Here’s the kicker: on a blog, even if it hasn’t evoked much community, it remains somewhat active if there are several postings a week. On a forum–at our blog’s level of activity–it would appear dead in the water. And, such a forum still would serve our purpose, but to the experienced outsider, it would “look” dead.
Let’s suppose that–nevertheless–this would be where a forum began at, and, quickly, it would gain say 25 members, each who would post on a average once a week. Community around topics begins to grow.
Presumably, before that happened, we’d have designed the political structure, moderation, and, the basic rules of the road, and also would have adapted ways to defeat forum spam, and, made copyright policies.
Most important of all, we would have developed contingency plans for dealing with the administrative labor required to police and mentor a quickly growing forum.
Finally, all of this would figure into a cost model due to the bandwidth impact of unpredictable growth. Yes, some of these factors also figure into the growth of participant community on a blog.
I visualize a blog as a house, and a forum as a neighborhood.
