Hello everybody! This is my first post here, so please excuse me, if it is not the right place for it.
The question is: What is the difference between forum and blog?
What I know:
Forum is a system for dicussion.
Blog is a system for web journal or diary.
I have seen over the Internet that many people use forum systems to make blogs and blog systems to make discussions. It seems that the difference is not in the software but in our minds - depends on how we will interpret it. However, there are differences in the software and I wondered what are they.
I am not a PHP programmer, and I am not so aware of Drupal but I checked the code of the forum and blog module of Drupal 4.7(I will install Drupal 5 but now havent access to ). I looked only at the kind of functions they have - what both have and what one has but another hasn't.
The blog module has some function about syndication. The forum is with tree-like architecture. Is this the only difference between them?
Can I make decentralized forums with the forum module? For example. If I have a question about the health of my pet and have both forum about pets and forum about health, the question to be posted in both of the forums(not very smart example but shows what i want). I know that this can be done with blog module if I tag the content with two tags from the taxonomy, but forum has only one vocabulary. If I do it with blog module, do I miss some interesting functionality from forum module?
Comments
My 2 cents worth
I look at blog's as user centric, each user may have a blog they can post to and you may choose to allow comments in which case people can respond but all the "main" posting are by the owner of the blog.
I see forum's as community centric, anyone can start a discussion and people can choose to respond (comment) or not.