Under discussion
The world is becoming bogged down in blogs. Everyone is either writing a blog, reading a blog, or asking what one is. And yet nobody seems to talk about discussion boards, and for discussion boards also read message boards and forums.
Whatever your interests or hobbies you will find a discussion board populated by like minded people eager to talk about koi carp or hill climbing or cross stitch. And the numbers are staggering
Take digitalspy.co.uk. This digital entertainment site now has more than 137,000 members registered on its forums. Now when you factor in that for every three readers of a forum, only one will be registered, then the numbers really begin to add up.
That would suggest that a post on one of the Digital Spy forums has a potential audience of some 500,000 members, about the same as the readership of the Times.
Friendsreunited are coy about how many people use their message boards but as they have 12 million registered users for the main site, we can guess it is quite a few.
The only people who have heard of the Jolt forums are probably the people registered as members - but as at the last count this was 978,763, this is a not inconsiderable number.
And given that there are at a conservative estimate more than 10 million discussion boards, message boards and forums, ready by UK audiences this is obviously a much under discussed and unrecognised medium.
Yes blogs are changing the way we communicate but essentially they are still a one to one communication and the majority of the blogs out there have a handful of readers. But post on a message board and you are talking to the world.
Discuss.
