Here is an article which I think gives an excellent  comparison between forums and blogs. I think one meaning for us is that we are talking of moderators in different discussions. Moderators  I have come to learn are pretty foreign to the conception of a Blog, and are more properly used with a community forum discussion.
Blogs are more meant for 1 perspective and forums multiple viewpoints.   On a forum there would be no problem with threading or comments (e.g. no special learning) saving a lot of work.

(Perhaps we some type of hybiridity would serve us best)


http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=377075&seqNum=3


What's the difference between forums and blogs? At first glance they might seem the same thing, both technically and socially. But at final glance, although forum software and blogs end up sharing a great many features, there are unique differences between them.

Forum Software: First and Not So Fab

Forum software for the Web has been around for just about as long as the Web. In fact, such software in its essence easily predates the Web by many years. BBSs and forums were run on a variety of standalone computers, Internet networks, and commercial networks such as the long-retired GEnie. Other familiar faces on that playing field included CompuServe, Delphi and Prodigy, MSN, and, of course, AOL.

All these services provide (or provided) some type of forum technology. On the proprietary services, especially, the technology worked well enough to allow for the formation of very strong communities that have held together despite massive changes to the way people access shared information online. So the first thing to bear in mind is that forums were always created to be forums, places in which people came to very specifically interact with groups of people sharing similar interests. This fact gives rise to a number of technical and social differences that have resulted as each type of application evolved.

Technical Aspects of Forum Software

It wasn't a huge step to think that we'd want to move what was a very successful technical and social success to the growing interest in the Web itself. The BBSs and forums of the pre-Web days were a natural offering for the Web, at least conceptually. When it came to actual implementation, though, things became a bit more challenging.

As you are probably aware, creating Web applications in 2005 is no easy task. Imagine trying to build forum software for the Web of 1995? It wasn't easy, but many of us worked hard to figure it out. During my time at the Microsoft Network, I worked on a team that was responsible for first building the proprietary forum system for MSN. We then scrapped it to make the move to the hottest gig in town: the Web. Making this move was not only technically challenging, but we had to figure out ways to successfully get our community members transferred over to the new Web-based system, which frankly wasn't as elegant. We pulled it off somehow, but to say that the Web-based forum system was clumsy in comparison to non-Web systems would be an understatement.

Once some semblance of more robust forum software became widespread, the term "community" became the big buzz. Popular Web forums remain in place today. A classic example is Slashdot, and there are many others that have become extraordinarily effective and successful.

But forum software is distinct in many ways from blog software. Some of the features might overlap, but out of the box, forum software offers features that blogging software requires advanced customization to attain.

NOTE

For the purpose of this discussion, I'm using server-side software as the example. Hosted forum and blogging software offer similar features, but much will depend upon the host's configuration and offerings regarding the software.

Some of the built-in features of forum software include the following:

  • Security. Authorization systems and other means of keeping the forum secure is a mainstay feature of forum software. Security for blogging software often relies on how the blogs are installed, how the servers they run on are configured, and whether any additional security must be customized to the individual scenario.
  • Ability to create unlimited forums with ease. You can create unlimited forums with most forum software. Blogging utilities often limit the number of blogs you can create, or it takes a little bit of server "fu" to be able to use blogging software in this fashion.
  • Very robust formatting options. Forums typically support a wide range of HTML formatting within posts. Although blogs also support this to a certain degree, the support is not as robust, nor is it meant to be.
  • Full-bodied administrative controls. Forum software is created with the understanding in mind that some form of moderation will be required. To that end, forum software tends to offer far richer features to its moderators: ability to easily create user groups, to control user access to different levels of the forum, to control and limit the way posts are handled by different access levels, and to easily lock out problem posters. Although blog software could certainly benefit from having more robust controls for this, they don't at this time.
  • More user controls. Unlike blogs, forums expect to have a lot of different users. To that end, there are all kinds of options for users that make the forum experience more full. From member profile pages to private messaging, users have a lot more to do on forums than they might on a blog.
  • More post features. Probably the defining difference between forums and blogs is that forums can be read linearly, or in a threaded view—and this option is rarely found in blogging comments, where comments are typically logged in backward chronological order only.

There are other differences, too, and many of them will depend on your forum software's feature list. If you're in the market for a forum, be sure to study the feature lists to make the best selections for your particular needs. Note also that many Web site providers offer certain forum software as part of your overall package.

Social Constructs within Forums

The other fundamental difference between forums and blogs is that forums are different social constructs than blogs.

Forums are specifically used for some type of community and are typically founded around a specific topic or community group such as crafts or textile artists.

Although there may be a leader or moderator, or even several moderators, that moderator is there to help ensure that questions get answered, that "troll" behavior (disruptive or negative posting) is kept to a minimum, that technical issues with the forum are managed, and that the conversations stay on topic and lively.

Blog Software

Unlike forum software, which grew out of an existing technical and social model, blog software is decidedly a child of the Web. The rise of independent publishing in the late 90s drove the interest, and a crop of software began to emerge to fill a distinct need: assist independent publishers to quickly and easily update particular pages on their sites. This is the heart of blogging: updated content. Community has occurred on blogs as a side effect of sorts. Unlike forums, blogs were not created on the premise of a broader community; rather they came about as a means to represent an individual or a small group of individuals.

Technical Differences

The history of blogging and blog software has definitely shaped the technical aspects of how blogs are delivered. The first and foremost required feature is a means of publishing content directly to the Web with as little mucking about with code as possible.

After that primary feature, blog software differs in what it can and can't do, but major technical features associated with blogs include the following:

  • Trackback/Pingback. Trackback and Pingback are technologies that allow you to send a notification from your blog to other blogs upon publication of a new entry. This allows for outreach and links conversations on similar topics from one blog to another. They are de facto technologies for blogging software; forums rarely offer this feature.
  • RSS and Atom generation. RSS and Atom are technologies that are often referred to as aggregation or syndication languages. They are a means for the blog author to excerpt or publish the entire entry in a format that newsreaders and newsfeeds can pick up and interpret. These technologies alert subscribers to a blog's feed when a new entry has been published. Forum software developers are beginning to implement aggregation technologies into their software (Slashdot has RSS feeds, for example).
  • Complex templating languages. Robust blog software typically uses either a proprietary tag language (such as Movable Type) or an existing language such as PHP (as in the case of WordPress). These languages allow extensive modification to the various pages within a blog, allowing the blog to drive multiple pages or blogs within a given site. Forum software can often be skinned to match the design of a parent site, but blog software specifically supports this kind of customization. Both blog and forum software in recent times have paid attention to the implementation of Web standards, which is very good news because they generate better and more useful HTML, XHTML, and CSS, allowing both types of systems to be easily modified and maintained.
  • Archiving systems, filtering, and search features. Because the primary use of blog technology is to regularly update content, some means of archiving that content and making it searchable are regularly offered via blogging software. Categories and subcategories for topic organization are easily defined in today's blogging software.
  • Comment systems. Only one feature from a list of many, a comment system is what turns a blog from a publishing system into a community. Comment systems, which are typically built into the blog software, allow broad and granular control to authors. If I want to never allow comments or always allow comments, or decide entry by entry whether I want comments to be open, I can control that behavior from within the software. If I want to close an open comment group, I can do so at any time. On the other hand, users have precious little control—maybe being able to use some HTML in their comments, preview their comment, and edit it are the extent of user controls in most blogging environments.

TIP

Be sure to drop by the features pages of your blog software's Web site to learn more about additional features offered.

Social Aspects of Blogging

As you are likely beginning to notice as a result of the technical differences between forums and blogs, blogs tend to be more concerned with connecting content and aggregating content. Blogs become communities only when comments are turned on and some discourse begins on that site.

In the case of blogs, the conversations can be very diverse because post entries tend to be diverse. I might publish a poem to my blog one day; then a detailed article on Web standards the next. Clearly, the comments and ensuing discussion for each will be radically different.

Unlike forum discussions, blog discussions are far more decentralized. Also unlike forums, blog commentary is focused on the individual (or individuals, in the case of group blogs) doing the writing. So blogs are more personality-oriented and as a result, the conversations can be more bidirectional than the group discussions that occur on forums. What's more, comment systems are not always appropriate for certain blogs (high risk of offensive spam, don't have moderation resources, and so on), and then the comparison becomes pretty moot because the community activity on the blog simply doesn't exist.

With Trackback and Pingback, another kind of social discussion occurs via blogs. Let's say I see an entry on someone's blog that really interests me. Instead of using a comment system to publish my response, I can write an entry to my own blog and then send a notification to the other blog about it. If set up for it, the responding blog will then automatically publish an excerpt of the entry with a link, allowing visitors to come on over to my place and read my response.

So blogs have a determinedly aggressive social agenda: They are not contained environments as forums are. The goal with blogs is to push the content out to as many venues as are interested, making the entire "blogosphere" a conversation. Whereas forums tend to remain more interested in the internal social connections.

Intersections

Of course, forum software can offer blogging software some hard-earned technical and social wisdom, and vice versa. Blogging software could benefit greatly from some of the security features offered via forum software, and the addition of a variety of comment types such as threaded discussions could really enrich the community aspects of blogging.

Some forums implement RSS feeds and could do well to expand the use of that and other aggregate technologies such as Trackback, which could be used not only to bring conversation to a wider audience (which might not be desirable for a given community) but also to allow cross-posting between like communities.

That forum and blogging software intersect is undeniable, but upon examination of their differences, particularly in their histories and social applications, it becomes clear that forums and blogs are distinct in character, each with an important role to enrich and extend community on the Web.