Does TechCrunch really need a Forum?

Had to pass comment on this one, because it’s one that I’ve given a lot of thought to.

TechCrunch has just put a forum online. My question is shouldn’t a mature blogosphere really make Forums redundant or else does this indicate the limitations of the blogosphere.

To explain further: The whole wonder of the blogosphere is distributed thought.  It means you don’t need to go to a Forum site to ask a question or express a point of view. You just do it in your blog. Anyone can comment. They don’t need to be a Forum member. It’s better indexed by search engines so more likely to get found. You can earn AdSense dollars by posting even if it is only a bit of beer money (or one beer maybe).

That’s the rationale, right. Problem is, there’s this little matter of audience that has kept big media companies alive for so long. You can write something on your blog but there’s no guarantee anyone is going to read it. You can however post something on a popular forum and be guaranteed that a couple of hundred or perhaps a couple of thousand people will tune in.

Forums have scalability problems. You get too many people posting and they become impossible to keep up with. Blogs and RSS feeds are for more scalable and larger volumes of information is much easier to manage.

The perfect aggregator should be the answer to the critical mass advantage of Forums. The ideal publishing environment gives a ready-made audience to all publishers but has the manageability inherent to RSS.

The tech space, and in particular the Web 2.0 space, has a number of really good aggregators and I do believe if you really want to get your voice out, you can do in that space. If there is a place therefore that a blogosphere niche is going to make Forums redundant it’s here.

In the end, I’ve found, it comes down to talent. If you have a Forum that has a bunch of knowledgable, respected and authoratitive people posting, then people will visit the Forum. If those people decided to write their own blogs instead, people would go to the Forum far less and start visiting their blogs. For both reasons, I can’t really see the need for the TechCrunch Forum, nor do I think it will ever really flourish.

In fact, looking at the postings already, I’d already say it’s struggling. You’re getting lots of threads being started but very few of them are really active. Can’t say the time I spent reading the Forum, threw up any incredible insights, and I think I’d have been much better served

Had I been the TechCrunch folk, I think they would have been much better served trying to do a better job of aggregating blogs. They can outniche Techmeme. I’m going to be bored shitless of techmeme over the next few days as CES dominates, because I don’t really have much of a gadget fascination and if TechCrunch stuck to aggregating Web 2.0/Internet blogs, it would certainly increase the value of the site to me. If I were Gabe thats a direction I would have definitely have taken with his technology – let publishers/blogs manage their own whitelist of relevent blogs and add an “In other news” widget or page to their site via his aggregation platform.

By the way, this is an area I’ve put a lot of thought into because its been central to where I’ve taken my 1Eyed project. Online sports conversations are dominated by Forums and so trying to take on that established way of communication with a blog-based model has been very challenging. It will be interesting to watch what happens at TechCrunch when the challenge works the other way around.

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