This post grew from a proposal I put together for a client of ours, who were interested in the distinction between forums or bulletin boards, and weblogs.
Their site incorporated a forum section, intended for their customers to discuss their products and services. Although there were a few posts from a hard-core of regulars, the forums didn’t get a lot of use – despite the traffic to the site being relatively high. When we initially suggested adding weblogs to the site, there was a degree of confusion about the differences between the two – they were under the impression that the two were largely the same.
What follows is a quick explanation of the differences – and relative strengths and weaknesses – between weblogs and forums.
Forums are great for high-traffic sites with large numbers of contributors
If you have a large active community, then forums can be a great way of developing interactivity and attracting visitors. It adds interactivity to the site, and gives your visitors somewhere they can engage in conversations with others.
Forums are good for dialogue-based sites
Forums lend themselves well to situations where there is a large amount of dialogue between visitors – in support boards, for example. The ‘threaded’ layout helps to structure a back-and-forth style of conversation
Is the site opinion-driven rather than dialogue-driven?
There’s a distinction between a opinion-driven site and a dialogue-driven site. One is much more ‘broadcast’ than the other – and company sites tend to be opinion-led. Their primary function is about informing visitors rather than engaging them in conversations.
Weblogs are fundementally opinion driven, whereas forums are about conversations. Although they can both overlap, conversations are secondary to a weblog – whereas a forum without conversation is a very lop-sided beast.
‘Seeding’ forums is very difficult
Getting a forum to a point where it is self-sustaining is very difficult in practice – it needs a large and active population to keep the dialogues flowing, but the population is drawn in the first place by flowing dialogues. This ‘chicken and egg’ situation is a difficult one to overcome – the overwhelming majority of visitors to a site will be passive ‘consumers’ of content rather than contributors, meaning that sites have to attract a very large number of visitors to get a contributor community of sufficient size to maintain forums.
Blogs tend not to suffer from this problem – it only takes one person to post articles, and comments will appear active and vibrant with a very much smaller number of active participants than an equivalent forum.
Decaying forums are very off-putting for visitors
It’s very obvious when a forum is inactive, because the numbers and dates of posts are prominently displayed. This is the online equivalent of tumbleweed – although there may be a huge number of visitors to the site, the perception created by the inactive forums is that there are very few.
A blog, by contrast, can look active with a much lower level of activity – meaning that it can take much less effort to ‘feed and water’.
There’s an increasing trend towards syndication
Syndication is becoming an increasingly popular way of subscribing to sites – the benefits include being able to monitor a very large number of sites from a single application, and rapid reading of new articles as they arrive.
Not all forum systems provide syndication feeds, and those that do suffer from the transition from a threaded dialogue on the forum to the linear one-after-the-other format of a news aggregator. The effect is to disconnect each post from it’s conversational context, making it very difficult to follow. Blogs, on the other hand, can feed comments with context intact by including the original post and prior comments.
Summary
There is no definitive answer as to which is best – weblog or forum? The choice is largely dependent on the overall aims of the site – is it intended as a forum where many people can engage in multi-way simultaneous conversations; or is it about imparting opinions or expertise? Either can work in either situation, but choosing the right tool for the job can make a site very much more successful.
