Blogs vs forums.
This kind of remark is something I happen to see fairly often:
“i see no advantage over a blogg [sic] than you would have with a forum script”.
In fact, people without much exposure to blogging often don’t see advantages - or even differences - between blogging and forums. Here’s my take on this argument…
URLs.
Spend a minute or two looking at the full URL of any individual page in a forum. Virtually indecipherable, isn’t it. That’s common amongst forums, and search engines often won’t index pages that have too many variables in the querystring, because they can never be absolutely certain where that page will lead. ie, search engines tend to stop a couple of variables in (after a couple of the ‘&’s in the URL for non techs). Try it - delete the last two or three ‘&’s away, and the chances are you don’t reach the same page. On the other hand, blogs tend to use search engine friendly URLs (no ‘?’s and no ‘&’s), which are much better for SE ranking. And because they’re also human-readable, they’re much easier for people to remember and write down.
Monitoring for spam and misuse.
While care does need to be taken with both tools, monitoring a forum can potentially be double the work of monitoring a blog. Why? Because you need to watch the initial threads as well as any replies. With a blog, you control the initial threads (and the direction of the conversation) implicitly.
Positioning you or your company as an ‘expert’.
Writing a blog can position you as an ‘expert’ in your niche if it’s focused, informative, intelligent, and well written. Plus, self-publishing and sharing your own knowledge has never, ever, been this easy before, and blogging is a super clear channel for publishing your own thinking and your own opinions (or those of your company).
That’s where the real benefit of a blog lies - and it’s where the benefits of networking, referrals and new business all come into play. In a forum, your input can easily get lost - simply because of the free-for-all group nature of a forum.
So, blogs vs forums? Nah… no contest. Literally. They’re very different tools for very different purposes.
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TDH said on February 16, 2006 @ 1:15 pm...
You’re making this a bit easy here, especially regarding the URL’s. Granted, lots of forum software out there have really crappy URL’s, but you can fix that just as you can control your permalinks with great blogging software like Wordpress. I think the problem is that forums has been around longer in a way, and therefor this issue hasn’t been fixed in the major systems (like security nightmare PhpBB for instance). The forums I install on new sites all have comprehensive permalinks just like my blogs. In fact, forums tend to get better permalinks since a post is in *one* forum and *one* topic - a blog post can belong to a lot of categories and maybe som tagging hierarchy as well.
That being said, I prefer blogs when I want to control the communication with my readers. As you stated, you control the post which means you are handing the visitor the frame of discussion. A forum is more chaotic and might get out of hand, but then again you can get input on things you hadn’t thought of since the visitor can post something completely out of the box - that’s harder when you’re relying on a blog for communication.
I run various sites, some which’s been around since 1997. The visitors are accustomed to forums, and commenting articles is a relatively new feature for them. I would like them to comment instead if hanging out in the forum, but it’s hard to get them to use that mean of communication without removing the forum - which makes the visitor strained and they get pissed off, might even leave the site.
My point is that forums and blogs are doing two very different things in the spectrum of communicating with visitors. Comparisons aren’t fair since it all depends on the site/product/purpose of your site.
That’s my two cents.*
Please keep in mind that you don’t get this many words for two cents when hiring me. Thanks.
Barry Bell (View profile) said on February 16, 2006 @ 1:57 pm...
No, I agree - like I said, two different tools for two different purposes.
That post was virtually a lift from a response I left on a forum yesterday where I was trying to convince people of the worth of blogs. Their argument was “i see no advantage over a blogg [sic] than you would have with a forum script.”
So I laid it out as simply as I could for them.