And message boards? by Ron Lichty

We'll certainly see, from the panelists tomorrow night, some examples not just of wikis and blogs but of message boards and the value they bring as well.

As a prelude to that topic, I received this note by return email today from a colleague, Paul Gustafson, now at ViewCentral:

"When I was consulting at Iron Speed, I created a 'user forum' to great effect. While it's more of a traditional BBS-style forum (not a wiki or a blog), it serves a very similar purpose of attracting and facilitating an online community through user-supplied content.

Once the forums were in place, Iron Speed found their community of developers were willing to share expertise, and even evangelize and support newbie downloaders of their evaluation software -- just because they thought it was cool!

You can check out the Iron Speed community.

Also -- FYI -- I created their entire forum with a very cool, and very inexpensive, web-based tool, websitetoolbox.

My advice for folks using wikis and blogs -- keep it simple, and focus more on the needs of the community -- and what content they want to see -- than any of the underlying technologies (BBS's, wikis, RSS, blog tools, etc.)."