Oct 02 2005
The changing role of Forums
I was in a conversation last week with AJ Kim about community and web site features, and she made a really interesting comment about Forums. She essentially that forums are OK for customer support and such, but that real community sharing is shifting away from Forums and getting replaced by Blogs. I have a lot of respect for AJ’s thought process, and read her blog regularly. I can see the logic, and would agree if I recast to say that a lot of ‘thought leaders’ (like AJ) contribute to their blogs, and conversations that cross blogs, rather than spend their time on web bboards (Forums). Also, a lot of people, myself included, spend a lot more time reading blogs and making comments on them than in perusing forums.
At the same time, this stuck with me over the weekend in an uneasy way. It’s been slowly gel-ing into the opinion that Forums serve a broader base for a web community with a common set of interests. Lots of forum contributors don’t write blogs, and at least for Bones in Motion, I’m thinking that as subscribership grows, we’ll see some real value come out of the forums (note that we actively encourage and facilitate blogging too – easy publishing of results to internal, and soon external, blogs).
Coincidentally (if there are such things), Russ Beattie just made an interesting post about where huge levels of Forum activity happen, how it is different from blogging, and a case for supporting anonymity rather than forced registration (and this being where the forums get huge in the first place). He raises dimensions that have been yet to cross my mind, especially around 2CH and other things coming out of Japan.