Is a blog really just a forum with other users unable to post "new threads"?
- Thread starter frm
- Start date
Pretty much. The only real difference is presentation of that; blogs are a few-to-many publishing method, forums are a many-to-many publishing method.
Blogs came along at a point when forums couldn’t sustain the posting of thought leaders within a community vs the regular populace.
Blogs came along at a point when forums couldn’t sustain the posting of thought leaders within a community vs the regular populace.
frm
Community Explorer
This is probably the main factor in deciphering the two because the target audience surely overlaps, be it few-to-many or many-to-many.
Sort of.
The main deal with a blog vs a forum is that you have a few publishing content with everyone else having more or less ability to reply to it, while in a forum typically everyone can post. The result is that in the latter case, no-one is special, while in the former, the author is more important than usual; the dynamic of publisher to commentator is different.
Presentation plays a key - e.g. XF's article threads vs regular threads, where the author gets a more concrete byline than you'd normally see on a forum precisely because it's not just about the content but about the author presenting the content - who says it can be as important as what's being said, a distinction very often lost in a forum because the presentation of a forum is intentionally neutral like that.
The main deal with a blog vs a forum is that you have a few publishing content with everyone else having more or less ability to reply to it, while in a forum typically everyone can post. The result is that in the latter case, no-one is special, while in the former, the author is more important than usual; the dynamic of publisher to commentator is different.
Presentation plays a key - e.g. XF's article threads vs regular threads, where the author gets a more concrete byline than you'd normally see on a forum precisely because it's not just about the content but about the author presenting the content - who says it can be as important as what's being said, a distinction very often lost in a forum because the presentation of a forum is intentionally neutral like that.
frm
Community Explorer
Can't this go for communities too, big and small? Groups tend to favor individuals, whether they be senior members or staff members. Now, while it might be more than 1 person, I have been a part of a community where the most favored was 1 person (a big board), and the brand was essentially him, until a scandal.
This is more or less, now, a blog post though. The presentation of the thread layout gave the author the more prominent byline and whatnot, but the fact remains the same, you're still on a forum.
There is a huge difference between the workings of the thing and the optics of the thing. Mechanically, yes, a forum is very much a redress of what mechanics a blog needs, and I have certainly dabbled in various creative abuses of boards in forums as blogs with limited posting rights before now.
But in a pure forum, the author of a topic is not especially prominent because in a forum setting, no individual is more important than any other by default. Even if some individuals are by dint of permissions or reputation (whether tracked and measured or not), the software inevitably treats them the same. Whatever meaning or special behaviours there are, are standard features applied specifically; it is meaning given form after the fact.
It is one of the things that irks me, and continues to irk me, how badly XF uses its own site to sell its software. It should be showcasing these features loud and proud because a “blog” adjunct to a forum is important - it’s one of the ways to add additional content, especially that “authoritative content” that the search engines like. And it feels so underbaked and left to add-on authors to fix,
It is also one of my criticisms of AMS and co that it feels disjointed for how it handles articles vs comments (not AMS’s fault as much as XF’s for failing to set out a sensible design language to convey the distinction)
But in a pure forum, the author of a topic is not especially prominent because in a forum setting, no individual is more important than any other by default. Even if some individuals are by dint of permissions or reputation (whether tracked and measured or not), the software inevitably treats them the same. Whatever meaning or special behaviours there are, are standard features applied specifically; it is meaning given form after the fact.
It is one of the things that irks me, and continues to irk me, how badly XF uses its own site to sell its software. It should be showcasing these features loud and proud because a “blog” adjunct to a forum is important - it’s one of the ways to add additional content, especially that “authoritative content” that the search engines like. And it feels so underbaked and left to add-on authors to fix,
It is also one of my criticisms of AMS and co that it feels disjointed for how it handles articles vs comments (not AMS’s fault as much as XF’s for failing to set out a sensible design language to convey the distinction)
Ravenfreak
Community Explorer
I don't necessarily see them as a forum. They're not as organized as a forum can be, and sometimes blog posts aren't broken up into paragraphs so it can be more difficult to read than a forum post IMO. Again it's just my perspective. Blogs are more like static websites than forums to me.
Think of a typical blog as closer to a forum board than an entire forum.
As for paragraph splits, most forum software does not bother to break this up to paragraphs meaning that when you read nicely split forum posts, chances are you're reading someone's content that has been consciously formatted.
frm
Community Explorer
If I am writing a very detailed post, I will use proper paragraphs when needed. My writing style will have to shift, otherwise you would be extremely lost if I continued without creating a new paragraph. This afternoon, I'm going to see if we can get pizza. See? It just doesn't make sense, even in short posts.
Forum (nodes, or whatever you want to call them) could be individual blogs if you set the permissions to "post new thread" on registered to "no" on every one of them, but gave a specific user that permission, for as long as the software would allow you.
Then you could essentially host free blogs...
Good thing blogging software typically makes this at least as easy as doing this in forums, and often considerably easier because blogging tools tend to focus on such things as part of the content creation stage.
It's one of the subtle differences between being given a WYSIWYG-ish type editor (a la forums) and being given something vastly more extensive like WordPress's Gutenberg (though you can return it to being just a WYSIWYG editor with a plugin)
So why do more sites not do this?
