Blogs to overtake Forums?

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief November 3, 2005 · 2 min read

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With the current trends in surfing habits nowadays, will it be a close possibility that blogs will soon overtake forums. At least in temrs of traffic and sticky-ness. I was asked that same question during the 1st Blogging Summit and if I remember it right, I said that there weren’t any strong signs of it then.

Now, I am inclined to side with blogs for the following reasons.

Blogs carry on the credibility and journalistic prowess of the blogger. Forums are a hodge-podge.
Blogs tend to go higher on SERPs than forums because of custom URLs and mod_rewrite. Forums are doomed with thread IDs and topic IDs.
RSS aggregation helps.
Blogs are now as popular as forums were 3 years ago and IRC 5 years ago.
You can get much more influential people to get involved with blogs than with forums.
Blogging is a medium. Forums, not likely.

However, the only benefit I am seeing with forums right now is that most (if not all) of my “technical research” are found there, with people sharing technical infos and how to’s with the community. Likewise, I am able to post a question about a certain problem and get answers or suggestions from people who are expert in the field or who have experienced the same problem.

These are just my observations though. I used to be very active with forums four or five years ago but now I seldom visit them. My regular surfing and online reading has now almost revolve around blogging.

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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6 Comments

rosh · 20 years ago

Blogs cannot be compared to forums directly. Blogging today has become a ‘serious’ web publishing phenomena rather than “hi, this is me blog”. So you may have a corporate blog reaching out to the mass audience without a ‘personality into it. Forums on the other hand lend stickiness to a website
by letting people have informal and friendly discussions. Forums can also be used to drive traffic to your blog or site.
These are my personal views…….

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief · 21 years ago

You have veyr good points there, dre. But again, if we are to compare one forum against one blog then there’s a big difference there altogether. I am more leaning towards organized blog networks and organized forums and then you’ll see the inherent advantages of a blog.

In any case, you just gave me a topic for PTB. :D

Andre · 21 years ago

Nope never ever, unless some blog software like Evo Dev develops some integration for Blogs then they will get more traffic, blogs are not stickier than forums, people come back to blogs once a day or a few times a day, people refresh forums every 5 minutes. Forums not ranking well used to be a problem but Google has overcome that, in general forums are like pages of content, and a lot of it which is updated frequently, a lot more than blogs. While forums are more open and need moderation, there is some authority with blogs, but blogs have a lot of power in the linking and trackbacks, one blog links and story and so on, forums dont really link to other forums that much, so thats one reason for some higher serps but it has nothing to do with dynamic urls and file names I gurantee it.

There is aggregation for forums also.

Forums are like a chat room, you meet people, get to know them, talk about all kinds of things. In blogs, theres no community, just the Authors and the people who post comments frequently.

Also forums are well organized, blog comments are probably the biggest disappointment of blogs, 1 linear thread with no option for branching of discussions.

One thing about Blogs though is that they are focused on a certain topic, so your reader of a blog is more likely to click on ads than a forum viewer is since the forum viewer is just browsing for an interesting discussion.

All in all they’re apples and oranges, blogs are made to be blogs and forums are made to be forums.

Now why don’t you open up a forum here, it wouldn’t hurt, traffic would definitely increase :) oh wait open one on http://www.WebDev.ph/ :)