{"id":223,"date":"2006-01-18T19:37:32","date_gmt":"2006-01-19T00:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/?p=223"},"modified":"2006-01-18T19:37:32","modified_gmt":"2006-01-19T00:37:32","slug":"daily-dose-of-conversation-boards-vs-blogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/?p=223","title":{"rendered":"Daily Dose of Conversation – Boards vs Blogs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amy Gahran has posted 10 Reasons Why Blogs Are an Awkward Conversation Tool<\/a> and while I do agree that they can be, for some of the reasons she’s listed, I have some points to make… (This stems from the comments from one of her posts, Missing the Conversation for the Blog<\/a>, where my pal DnW<\/a> asked questions about Blogs vs Boards.)<\/p>\n

1) Amy says Blogs aren’t intuitive – and boards are?  Do you know how many times today I had to explain how to use a message board?  Do you want to know how many times I’ve had to explain it in the last 10 years?  Do you want to know what happens when you change your message board software from linear to threaded?  Or make even a tiny little change to your message board format – much less change software entirely?  Blogs may not be intuitive but for the most part it’s pretty obvious that the little link under a blog entry that says "comments" means you can see comments and maybe even make one.  <\/p>\n

\n2) Blogs are busy.  Yes, many of them are – and many of them are not.  But have you looked at a message board forum lately?  Unless you own the forum and keep it nice and clean you’re going to find the left side, right side, bottom footer and header incredibly busy.  Have you looked at iVillage message boards<\/a> lately?  And remember, you can unbusy a blog really easily – RSS feed reader!  Some message board forums do offer email digests so you can unbusy those as well, but not all do. \n<\/p>\n

\n3) Unthreaded comments – again, look at message boards.  They don’t all offer threaded views and when they do, the threading does not always work.  Plus you have folks who don’t know how to use the darn things so if you’re reading them in an email digest you have this mess of previous comments tucked into what you’re reading and it is impossible to follow.  (That MF yahoo group I mentioned the other day drives me insane at times for this reason)<\/p>\n

\n4) Comments don’t equal conversation – very, very true.  But this isn’t a problem related to blogs only, it happens everyday and all day long on message boards.  Oh does it ever.  It’s like pulling teeth sometimes to convince people to talk to each other on a message board.  And those poor message board posts don’t always get comments either.  Or they get one comment from a moderator saying "hi and welcome" or "hi, go read this article" and that my friend is that.  *Amy puts an aside here regarding some of the best conversations taking place between blogs, much as I’m doing with Amy right now.  This rarely happens on message boards and in a lot of cases message board moderators discourage such things.  What stays on one board should stay on that board and not be discussed "behind those people’s backs" on another message board.  This behind people’s back, cross board talking causes flame wars like you would not believe because it feels secret and like an attack.  I don’t think Amy is going to consider my post an attack on her – (I’m going to send her a trackback and encourage her to share her thoughts about what I’ve written. ) And, another thing that happens with this type of between blog conversation is you’ll find people who read my blog but do not read Amy’s will go and visit her and they will comment.  The same may happen for me  with people who read Amy’s blog but do not visit mine.  Expanding our horizons and our interaction happens so much more easily on blogs than on boards.<\/p>\n

\n5) Comments don’t always get replies – again, typical of message boards as well.  No reply at all or a moderator directing the commenter elsewhere.  You can’t force people to converse or to respond to your thoughts, whether it is on a board or a blog or in face to face interaction.<\/p>\n

\n6) No easy way to follow up to comments – this is a universal problem.  If you’ve got good blog software or good board software then this isn’t an issue.  Bad software, it’s a problem.<\/p>\n

\n7) Turning off the comments (and trackbacks) – unless you own (or manage) a message board forum, you can’t do this (and sometimes even then you can’t do it).  There are times when you want to say something and you truly don’t want a visible, public conversation.  That does not, however, stop others from having a conversation with you – it just means they have to initiate the conversation on their own blog or within email.  Look at Winer – he has no comments but he still has conversations with people who chooses to converse with.  he is not inundated with comments from those who he has no time to converse with.  He’s got the control, with blogs, to have the conversation he wants to have.  That can make sense from someone like Winer who umm has a tendency to whine about stuff.  \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

\n8) Inequality – This is certainly not a blogcentric issue.  Message board communities are incredibly "cliquey".  Have you ever tried to break into a very tight message board forum?  Have you ever spent a week reading every message board post, commenting about things that interest you, introducing yourself only to have your posts ignored by everyone except the moderator?  Even if the message board community has welcomed you and encouraged you, it’s very difficult to jump in and start talking when everyone "around you" appears to be the "best of friends".  Besides the whole "A list" thing, I find this happens less on blogs than on boards.  Even people like Scoble are pleased when someone new visits them and posts an interesting comment.  I have not met a blogger with a stat tracker of some type who was not thrilled to see a new IP address in their logs.  Visitors may not know about that excitement but if you read some blogs (not the A-listers) you’ll quickly realize this is a huge deal – people blog about this all of the time!  If you want to feel loved folks, post on 3 news to you (non A-list) blogs a day.  <\/p>\n

\n9) Lots of people don’t like blogs, and that’s ok.  (though I will smile at DnW just a little bit) But a lot of people don’t like chat and a lot of people don’t like boards.  That’s ok too. A lot of people don’t like face to face interaction, either.  Or the telephone, there’s a lot of telephone phobia in the world!  Some of my best cyber friends read my blog, but are not bloggers.  I do believe that many of them like it when I blog because I ummm talk more than I do on my board.  (sorry guys) And one cyberfriend in particular is not so great on boards but give her a blog and she’s awesome… and as a personal aside, she’s better on the boards now too.  Much more talkative and open.  It’s like she found her voice on her blog and it carried over to the boards.<\/p>\n

\n10) It is faster to talk – and it is often faster to post on a board.  But, with a blog the words live on for as long as the blogs are there.  It’s so much easier to pick up where you left off when you’ve posted on a blog.  Trackbacks are beautiful things.  And, let’s talk stats again – I can look at my stats and see that the post I wrote about popcorn almost 9 months ago gets a huge number of hits (huge is a relative term, I’m not an A-lister!) so I could write more about that if I wanted to draw more people in.  With a message board, that’s not going to happen (unless you own the forum and have really good metrics but who has those???).  And of course I could ask Amy if she wanted to Skype about this or I could call DnW on the phone and say let’s talk this out and it would be faster – but then it would be just us, and we wouldn’t be drawing more folks in, hearing new perspectives and learning from a wide range of experiences.  Faster is not always better, in fact it generally isn’t when you’re talking about conversation.<\/p>\n

\nI could go on and on and on but I see that I already have.  And in case anyone is getting the impression that I don’t like message boards, that would be incorrect.  I love them.  And I love chat too.  All tools for conversation are good and all can be awkward – and sometimes awkward is good.  But ummm I’m not fond of the telephone.<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: conversation<\/a>, community<\/a>, toolsforconversation<\/a>, blogs<\/a>, messageboards<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amy Gahran has posted 10 Reasons Why Blogs Are an Awkward Conversation Tool and while I do agree that they can be, for some of the reasons she’s listed, I have some points to make… (This stems from the comments from one of her posts, Missing the Conversation for the Blog, where my pal DnW […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-chest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flamingohouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}