Carl D Cravens (Mod) writes:

I think mashing up blogs and forums confuses personal soap box with community discussion, and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.

OK, so I'm probably guilty of thinking "hey, that's a nifty idea, how do we build it" without pausing at "Exactly why do we need this"; guess this is because I've been trained as a systems analyst rather than a business analyst.

OTOH, we talk about 'community', but what do we mean by this? I'm in a great many overlapping communities (and I'm increasingly finding online communities overlapping with real-world ones as well). There are a few blogs that have become communities in their own right (Patrick and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden's Making Light is an obvious one).

While I can see your distinction between the sorts of thing you post on a blog, and the sorts of things that are discussion-starters on fora, I can see a lot of overlap, which is why I frequently do crosspost.

I think there's less merit in trying to merge any followup discussions; it might be that piping category-level RSS feeds to specified fora is as much as is really worth doing.

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog