Well, not exactly forget but stumbling across The Student Room sent me to Big Boards, a site tracking forum activity. The Student Room does very respectably, enough to make me sit up and take notice but the number one board they track is Gaia Online, a role playing and anime forum with over 12 million members and 13 billion postings. It’s not the biggest social network in the world (LinkedIn, for example, has 17 million members) but that surely makes it one of the more active.
Kind of puts Ning into perspective, doesn’t it?
So why, when the likes of me talk about social networking, are forums so often left out of the conversation? Is it because they feel like transistors to Web 2.0’s silicon? Because forums are inevitably trees rather than rhizomes? Or because they’re difficult to navigate, demand considerable investments of time and energy and oblige you to go out and work for your content and connections whilst the average self-styled social network simply drops them in your lap? There’s certainly an exponentially smaller level of technical investment involved in getting one up and running, mind you.
Hmm. Perhaps forums are more like a village square or market place where anyone can listen in to a conversation (is Twitter simply a massive unthreaded forum?) and perhaps that’s the attraction for a demographic like The Student Room. Of course, the same could be said of online communities like Club Penguin or Second Life but there’s nothing quite as instantaneous as low-end tech. The most active and invaluable forums, come to think of it, are found wherever geeks congregate, be that Slashdot (still the model for forum management) and Ars Technica.
One thing I remember (from helping set up the original BBC Online forums with Lizzie Jackson, who did most of the hard work, incidentally) is that successful forums are expensive if you need to moderate them – unless you can get your users to moderate them for you. But that’s another story (more detail from Laurel Papworth here).
(And I suppose if a forum is a village square, a blog is a bloke on a soapbox shouting randomly at passers-by.)
Filed under: Web 2.0, online communities, social media, social networking, social networks | Tagged: Big Boards, blogs, forums, forums versus social networks, Gaia Online, social media, social networks
