Difference between Blogs and Forums

[Floris]

Your site is the house, the network is your town.

I am just Floris.

 

[anotheralias]

Blogs: you're in the audience watching something on a stage; sometimes you make a comment to the person sitting next to you. Whether you enjoy the experience or not is largely up to the people on the stage.

Forums: you're at a party that's in full swing; you wander from group to group taking part in conversations and starting your own. Someone else provides the drinks and snacks, but whether you enjoy the experience or not is largely up to you.

 

[Grover]

We also have vBlog (hate it)...

Hello Susan,

I am interested to know what you hate about vBlog? I am also not a big fan (especially in the vB3.8 series, because the default style was just not suited for a blog product very well, in my eyes. Remarkable, because the forum product has an outstanding style in that series), but -apart from the style- I can not put my finger on it why exactly. For people who do not want to use a Wordpress bridge or something like that, I dearly hope XenForo will come with a simple, easy integrated Blog solution in the future. (And hopefully this future will not be that long...)

 

[Danny.VBT]

Blogging is a very dynamic medium; by that I mean that there are varied motivations to why people blog: to vent, muse, commentate, record; etc;etc...so it's important to figure out what kind of blogging will best promote your community.

Eg; if you run, say, a community about those suffering from a particular disease, blogs will serve as a means to vent and record whereas a political forum would probably commentate on current events. This will also effect how much your market user blogging throughout your forum!

I think the biggest question is can all threads just as ably be blog posts? what about vice versa? I personally don't think so.

 

[Brandon_R]

Well a blog is basically an online Journal but a forum is a medium for open discussions. Blogs are what you think whereas a forum is what everyone thinks.

 

[Jake Bunce]

I always tell my customers that blogs and forums are very similar. Blogs are less organized and more personal, whereas forums are more organized and less personal. Blogs are organized per user, whereas forums are organized per forum.

 

[Twisted Chaos]

i like the tool analysis..

Take one of my sites for example..
We have a forums, a cms, a blog , a poll, and a chat room...
We use the cms to tie everything together by pulling little bits and parts of the site together as a whole for a general picture of what we are about.
Then we use the blogs portion for reviews of books, journalistic purposes, and for a "I am presenting this" kind of feel for articles..
Add in the forums which let everyone discuss anything the interests them(be it our reviews or what they did that day doesnt matter) I gets the users involved and makes them feel important
we use polls to keep our users interested in what we have to offer by letting them pick our next review or even our next addon to the site..
last but not least we use a live chat feature to engage our users that prefer to not wait for any answers and must push on to the "deeper" and better conversations as it seems...
The chat for the most part is unmonitored and it states so in the TOS so take others into consideration..
However everything else is moderated or controlled in almost every way to some degree..

 

[GofD]

Hello Susan,

I am interested to know what you hate about vBlog? I am also not a big fan (especially in the vB3.8 series, because the default style was just not suited for a blog product very well, in my eyes. Remarkable, because the forum product has an outstanding style in that series), but -apart from the style- I can not put my finger on it why exactly. For people who do not want to use a Wordpress bridge or something like that, I dearly hope XenForo will come with a simple, easy integrated Blog solution in the future. (And hopefully this future will not be that long...)

Hey Grover - I don't know if you've made the connection between Tigratrus and I, but we are husband and wife, so partners in this. His reasons for disliking vBlog are mine as well but being that I don't know if he's elaborated on it, I will.

Prior to having vBlog, we used the vBlogetin system, which we liked very much. We liked the developers (still do), and they were good about listening to the community and implementing suggestions where possible. We were invested in their future. We were anticipating the development vBlogetin to include search integration and more to make the members' blogs more tightly integrated into the forums - to prevent fracturing the community. It may be a quirk of our membership, but we have members who want to both blog in the personal 'journals' and participate in community discussions, answer questions, ask questions, etc. - we want very much to encourage that by providing a tight integration.

Then vB announced vBlog and vBlogetin literally died on the vine. When vBlog finally came out, we found it lacking in many of the standard features that we'd gotten accustomed to with vBlogetin (the ability of the member to customize through 'blocks,' a way to show content from the blogs in the forums (like a 'latest blogs' module) etc.) + the style and templating was horrible. I don't think the 'import' (if there even was one, I don't recall) ever worked right either, so we have further fracturing of the blogs themselves - some on the legacy system, some on vBlog, etc. Further, it was never developed beyond its initial release and put a good mod out of business in the process.

Personally, looking back, I wish we'd never implemented vBlog, but at the time we were led to believe that it would be developed and have a future. Not so much.