Like Coke versus Pepsi, BMW versus
Mercedes, another debate arising now: Blog versus forum. We will
discuss a brief history of both, present and possible future of both.
Definitions
Blog : A shared
on-line journal where people can post diary entries about their
personal experiences and hobbies; “postings on a blog are usually in
chronological order”. (
Reference)
Forum : An
Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where
people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. (
Reference)
History
Blog : The term
“weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form,
“blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog
into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April
or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used “blog”
as both a noun and verb (“to blog,” meaning “to edit one’s weblog or to
post to one’s weblog”) and devised the term “blogger” in connection
with Pyra Labs’ Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the
terms.
While the term “blog” was not coined until the late 1990s, the history of blogging starts with several digital precursors to it.
Forum: Forums
perform a function similar to that of dial-up bulletin board systems and
Usenet networks that were first created starting in the late 1970s.
Early web-based forums date back as far as 1994, with the WIT project
from W3 Consortium and starting from this time, many alternatives were
created.
Justin Hall, recognized as one of the earliest pioneers
in blog-like posting, first began publishing links from his Swarthmore
College dorm room in 1994. He remembers the heady early days of online
publishing, and notes that as entry barriers lessen, a new wave of
microblogging is upon us. Thanks to blogs, zero technical know-how is
required of today’s web publishers. All they need is an idea.
-By Jenna Wortham; Wired.net
Similarities
With both blogs and forums, users can
post a comment and reply to other comments, thus developing discussions.
In both cases, you can leave comments which may or may not be moderated
and you may have to identify yourself with a name and email address.
Differences
In blogs post or the content is made by a
single user, comments are minor part of it. It is more centralized,
trusted individuals provide accounts of events and information.
In forums a discussion on a particular
topic by allowing commenting of posts. Decentralized, needs other
special group of users (Moderators, Administrators etc.) to control
proper discipline.
(Adapted from Blogs vs Forums)
From Search engine optimization (SEO) point of view
Blog uses advanced technology which
offers the writer to add various attributes, Trackback, RSS,
Aggregation, Permalinking, Cross linking; whereas Forum uses typically
relatively older technologies. Forum based on (basically) blogging
platform, such as WordPress is used now, but not that popular.
From “getting information” point of view
To get a specific information; users
generally searches the web by using a search engine and reaches either
to a forum or a blog. However, to find an information or to reach to a
conclusion, user needs to waste much more time in a forum due to
flooding of oneliner replies.
Blogs are more organized and informative.
Infact, most of the popular website providing useful information to the
users are blogs. Today, almost all know about Tutplus tutorials.
Social sites are killing forums
The necessity to communicate with like
minded persons are now easily done via Facebook groups, Twitter or
deviantArt (for artists, developers and users). Again, some of these
social sites offers “blogs”, “notes”, “journals” etc.
When forum is more suitable for users
To solve a problem, users need a groups
advice. Forums can serve the purpose easily. However, most of the
bloggers are very active (though alone) and efficient, so this point
blurs too.
Future
Trend is rapidly shifting towards
blog-reading and blog-writing. Almost all multi national companies (such
as Google, Microsoft) involve employers to write blogs. More people are
writing blog about the topic they know about. Definitely, it is
creating a good source of information via internet, as a whole in a well
organized manner.
