Many companies have found forums to be a benefit in fielding questions from users.  The forums allow users to interact and talk about their experiences with the product and even take customer service requests.  Forums attract potential customers who are interested in the product and offer a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” or FAQ.

There are a number of implementations of Forums that are available either as open source or for hire. PHPbb (http://www.phpbb.com/) is a very popular board as is Invision PowerBoard (http://www.invisionpower.com/)

Weblogs are similar to Forums in that users can post messages and others can add comments.  But Weblogs are more like personal newspapers.  The writer (or Blogger) posts a message or article about a topic they find important.  Then, “friends” of the Blogger can leave comments and links back to their blog.  This creates another semantic network of information. 

Equally importantly, it creates a network of people.  Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) and LiveJournal (http://www.blogger.com/start) are examples of straightforward Weblogs.  For the more socially advanced, there is MySpace (http://myspace.com) where the point of the website is to create a network of friends and their friends and leave messages in an ever-increasing criss-cross network pattern.

Finally in our survey of data management and social web services, is the Content Management System (CMS).  This is one part prefabricated website and one part forum.  The CMS allows the web master to create topics and categories of information.  The web master can add content using the web browser - without learning HTML. Visitors to the website can add comments and even content in some cases.

Examples of the more advanced CMS systems are Joomla! (http://www.joomla.org/) and Mambo (http://www.mamboserver.com/).  These two CMS systems actually spring from the same source.  The controversy over their split is beyond the scope of this article, but well documented on the web.  Another very nice and mature CMS is phpNuke (http://phpnuke.org/). All three of these CMS systems run under PHP with MySql and are open source.

The promise of Web 2.0 is the ability for users to interact and add content to the web without knowledge of low-level technology.  All anyone needs is the ability to point, click, and type.  This brings the promise of the Internet as the “people’s medium” home to the ordinary user.

Author : Greg Smith

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