Gentle Readers: I just sent this out to my colleagues in Peak Potential who will be helping out with IntelligenceRiver.net, the web site that will support Grow With the Flow (GWTF). Just in case you’re as clueless as we are about blogs and forums and the differences between them, here’s what I sent my fellow “Peakers.”

This is the first of two messages. This one explains the difference between a blog and a forum. The second one is my thoughts on how to keep our blog entries organized. That one is mostly thinking out loud to myself – I hope it will also be helpful to you.

A reminder: The Coffee Shop is our forum, RiverTown News (RTN) is our blog. Let’s see how far I can push the analogies about the two.

In the Coffee Shop / forum, GWTF readers chat with each other, and we join in when we want to. In the coffee shop analogy, I picture us as the folks behind the counter who serve the coffee and clean the tables when someone spills something. We chat with customers from time to time, but mostly they sit and talk with each other and we keep the shop neat and tidy so they have a pleasant, orderly place to talk.

Each conversational topic stays active indefinitely, as though each table in the coffee shop were reserved for people who wanted to talk about a certain topic: “If you want to discuss Media and the Culture come sit at this table.” If no one’s there, the table still stays there, waiting for people who want to talk about that topic. Of course people are writing each other, not really talking, so someone can come in when no one else is there and leave a note at the table for others, who may want to add their own note later – in this coffee shop, customers don’t have to be there at the same time. (And, of course, a person can sit at more than one table.)

But there isn’t just one table for a topic; within a broad topic like Media and the Culture, there may be many tables on facets of the topic – picture that there’s a corner of the Coffee Shop where everyone is talking about Media and the Culture, but with lots of tables in that corner: one where people are talking about TV, another where they’re talking about whether video games are good or evil, and so on. Although we shopkeepers set up a few likely tables for people when we opened the shop, any customer can set up a new table any time a more detailed conversation seems to need it. However, we also encourage them to not have too many tables, or people will get lost in the maze and not be able to find the one that interests them.

Paul can clarify this for us, but I think the most recent post is always at the top, and the earlier ones are farther down the pile – pushing the analogy beyond all hope, there’s a record at each table of the conversations held there, with the most recent one on top of the pile, so when you get to the table, you can look over what people have been saying, and continue the conversation, whether anyone’s there at the moment or not.

In the RiverTown News / blog, we start up a given topic: We write articles, and readers may write to comment on our articles. Thus the newspaper analogy: We’re the editors and reporters of the newspaper, readers write letters to the editor by posting a “Comment.” Each article gradually moves down the stack of new articles – picture the old stack of newspapers, with the newest one on top.

There are three problems with the analogy:
(1) Articles appear whenever we post them, one at a time: We don’t collect a whole issue of articles and publish them all at the same time, the way a paper newspaper would.
(2) Letters to the editor (comments on our articles) stay with the original article, instead of showing up in a later issue of the paper. This works much better: Readers can easily search for a topic, then all the comments about it are right there together. The comments (letters to the editor) follow the original article in the order they were posted, so the fiirst comment is nearest to the article. This means you can read the article, then keep on reading down through the conversation it engendered.
(3) You and I eventually get around to tossing out back issues, but on IntelligenceRiver.net, the stack grows indefinitely. We do keep the stack neat and orderly by checking comments that come in on any article, however old.

It seems to me the two places, Coffee Shop / forum and RiverTown News / blog will overlap: If one reader comments on an article we wrote for the paper, and then another reader comments on the comment, the blog begins to look like a forum. The only difference lies in the point of origin: they’re commenting on an article we posted. Note that if we posted an article in RTN and it interested people so there was a whole string of comments, we might decide we needed a new table in the Coffee Shop, dedicated to this topic.

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