Blogoforum : Forum 2.0

Filed in archive Newsdesk 2.0 on October 9, 2006

I have never liked forums much - with their static content and moderation, I know forums have been part of the grow into web2.0, but I never liked them. But a new kind of forum hs come alive recently : A forum and a blog, mixed together into one. I recently reviewed Switchboard, a perfect example of this, and today's turn is Blogoforum's. Calling itself The Better Forum Experiment, blogoforum promises to be a forum with freedom : You can freely classify your posts by tagging them, instead of being pushed into the rigid setup of the forum. Denis Krukovsky had an idea back in januari to create place for users to leave feedback and exchange information and ideas. Combined with tags, this lead to his idea for Blogoforum. Blogoforum is different because of these features :

• Common administrator-defined sub-sub-forum hierarchy is the thing
  of the past. In a world of messages about anything, tag-based
  classification and navigation rules


• Collaborative tagging moves power from
  moderator to user, allows to correct categorization mistakes and
  identify spam. (remember all the spam troubles on forums ?)


• Ego is great. Having all messages in their own. blog, Blogoforum
  users take more responsibility on what they write.


• Big question is how to let the discussion to flow smoothly from one
  topic to another, just as it happens in real life? On Blogoforum, each post is potential new discussion starter, on same or different set of topics.

Blogoforum is revolutionary in it's own way. It is new in it's setup, yet converstions behave exactly like in real life. No more so-called power users that start screaming you're off-topic. No more bans because you like a discussion everybody fears. Freedom, discussion, information and tips. Plain and simple. Blogoforum's main competitors are discussion tools like Google Groups or vBulletin forums, and it's likely other people are also working on solutions like Blogoforum. But for now, I think Blogoforum is the strongest player in the game.