I am often asked by clients and others, 'What is the difference between a blog and a forum?'
My answer generally varies depending on the context the question is asked in. By this I mean, are they referring to technology differences, user interaction or content.
In a session at the New Communications Forum, Neville Hobson discussed the issue of blogs versus forums. Anita Campbell live-blogged the session and offered these highlights:
- The person who owns the blog can choose the topics that are discussed and direct the discussion, more so than on a message board.
- You'll find it easier to link to an individual topic or post on a blog, because each post has a "permalink." Whereas, depending on the particular forum technology being used, it can be hard to link to a particular thread.
- Forums tend to be heavily moderated by the owners, leading to a lack of perceived trust. Blogs on the other hand, tend to be high-trust animals.
- Blogs can be more user-friendly for the reader, because they are written as conversations with the items appearing front and center on the site. Forums tend to require more drilling down to read them.
Another issue is that often when working with clients we make a choice not to index the forum contents in the site search. Indexing the sometimes thousands of pages in a forum can severly skew search results. A blog's content will be included in the site search index though. In all cases we will offer a forum specific search.
Shel Holtz who also blogged the session offers this great point:
In a message board, those who do not participate are referred to as “lurkers.” There is an expectation of participation. No such expectation exists with blogs, where readers are welcome to comment if they like (and if commenting is enabled), but reading content is really the primary objective.
