Thanks for the explanation, Carol.
I usually figure that someone doesn't know the lingo when he/she calls a forum a blog. (Haven't seen it the other way around.)
It matters to me, because the word forum is an ancient one and to me it represents a place where the community has a voice.
A blog is a place for an individual to find a voice and often to get feedback. But that is not to say that a blog can't further community.
Tiffany's blog does create a community, because a lot of people discuss her articles and interact with each other.
The difference is that in a forum, any registered user can begin a topic, but in a blog, only the blogger starts a topic. So the blogger shapes the overall content in a very hands on way.
However, many forums have strict rules about what type of content can be in which forum.
Forums typically allow a post or topic to go up without pre-screening; then the moderator removes what is against guidelines.
Blogs can either have comment moderation on or off. If it on, the comments won't be posted until the blogger has a chance to screen them, and some may not get posted.
Another difference is that most forums need to attract a decent sized membership or they have very little content and die off.
A blog can live on by itself if the creator comes up with a lot of posts. A blog can be a photojournal, an online diary, a place to post recipes; it is a form of self-publishing special interests at one end of the spectrum, or it can be journalistic, like The Big Island Chronicle.
Before we had "forums," we had bulletin boards and then message boards. When I first used the "net" and was told to check out a bulletin board, it was more like someone would post an item or an announcement. Then people might reply and start a discussion, but not always.
Some of them really were ways to get messages to other people, back when everyone wasn't emailing and linking to articles.
I'm sure I didn't see all there was to see back in the 90's. The one I belonged to was a "list-serve" for academics working on James Joyce, and they would post calls for papers, and items on stuff they had discovered. For me that was the beginning of something like a forum.
-----
Words that bother me -- yes on all the examples. By bother I mean I notice them, not that I get bent out of shape.
One that comes to mind is so many quite literate people now say "loose" when they mean "lose." The two words don't have the same meaning or derivation.
Another one is "lightning" and "lightening." The flashes in the sky are not lightening. Streaking your hair is lightening. [
]
A big one on travel forums is "sites" and "sights."
It is common now to say "site seeing." While it's kinda sorta what you might be doing, the phrase is "sightseeing."
I read these all the time and I always let it go, but in a topic like this, it is fun to vent. [
]
]
