Is the forum and BBS technology threatened by the blog scene?

My friend Tomas Nielsen has just started a forum, for all top-notches domino developers that needs some challenge and still think that the Lotus Domino is best in class. The name of the forum is http://www.dominoexperts.com and has a some members already. I know many of them and are not afraid to say that they are the absolute best of all domino developers I’ve met.

Me and Tomas had a small chat recently and I started to think on where the BBS/forum ways of communicating is heading. I don’t follow any forums on behalf of my job position and I think I have a reasonable theory why:
There are many different sources to use when information is needed. When I’m looking for something related to my work I always start with a [tag]del.icio.us[/tag] search on my own bookmarks where I have stored all blogs and sites I regular visits, extends it to everyones bookmarks. Then I do a google search, which in cases involving [tag]IBM Websphere[/tag] is rather useless because there’s just to much crap and information on old versions still indexed by [tag]Google[/tag].

When I fail at google I usually go directly to developerworks and the forums located there. Those forums are very technical oriented and there’s no familiar friendly atmosphere, instead short head-on answers are sometimes given to the question. The forums at [tag]notes.net [/tag]has gone the same way, more users, less warm feeling.
Everyone needs acknowledgment and I think the BBS-boards might have lost some users to the blog-scene. My theory is that all bloggers tends to read and comment on many other blogs and that the interaction between people goes in comments and post-links in comparison to head-entry and replies on a specific forum. The outcome of this trend is that not only registered forum members can see a post and the replies but a reader of my blog might see a reply or comment I did on a post someone posted on another blog. A [tag]blog [/tag]totally unknown for my reader. This is very interesting indeed.

However, small and/or well moderated forums is still needed. I’m member of a Swedish forum just for owners of a special camera for example. Another forum I’m attending is something we started up back in 1996 with a bunch of friends, it’s still active and without it I do believe we wouldn’t see much of each other.
I think there is a room on the scene for a dedicated lotus domino forum that will contain top-engineers that still believe in the [tag]Lotus Domino[/tag] product and still finds it interesting to try new stuff.

Fortunately, as written above, my friend Tomas Nielsen has just started such a forum, he calls it http://www.dominoexperts.com and has a few members already. Don’t forget to mention where you read about the new forum, free code is in the pot! :-)