Slashdot Mirror

Certainly not all the forum posts were deleted (yet!)

http://www.boardtracker.com/search/?q=consumer+report&o=0&s=apple.com

Good old fashioned internet forums or message boards provide all the online social interaction and information you could ever need in whatever field of interest you choose (there's a forum out there for every conceivable subject) without sacrificing your privacy (as long as you are careful). Many have social network type functions as well.

Of course most of them will have google ads so google could still cobble together all your online actvity..

Easy way to find forums that interest you is a forum search engine such as: http://www.boardtracker.com/

"Update: BoardTracker recently replaced its spiders with Koalas.."

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/4/

Many of those are NOT search engines at all (at most sites with a search feature) and many fairly well known, useful and actual search engines are ignored - where is technorati? where is boardtracker? blogpulse? sphere?

At least the 'author' could have done 5 mins research to find something actually relating to the title..

First of all tags are not exclusive to the blogosphere - they exist on the boardscape (see boardtracker for example) and of course on the many social nets and pretty much everywhere else.

There are already microformats for defining tags which can and should be used.

Tags are for building a folksonomy and created 'by the people' so are by their nature, to a certain extent, personalized and flexible.. what makes sense to you may make no sense to everyone else but so what? You made it, its good for you and thats good enough.. however chances are it will make sense to some other people anyway, no matter what or how you tag, so its all good.

Naturally, there are many ways to heirarchically structure the same information (by topic, by geography, by time), but a forum is forced to commit to only one.

Not any more.. forums are not forced to only one these days since things like topic tagging are taking hold (even here on slashdot!), enabling forum users to build a folksonomy which can completely change the hierarchical structure to suit the user and the data and can easily co-exist with existing structures. Check out http://www.boards.ie/ and http://blog.boardtracker.com/viewtopic.php?t=131 for examples.

Have a look at boardtracker.com to see how this space is developing in the 'web2.0' world.

Try a search on google trends to see how forums are actually still rising in popularity despite other 'cool' platforms like blogs and wikis getting all the hype.

At the end of the day when the hype fades away what will be left standing are the platforms which have proved themselves useful, those which serve a real need and forums have always done this through their various incarnations and will surely continue to do so.

Look at technorati for example and look at the effect (or lack of) on technorati traffic when google launched their own blogsearch.. nothing at all.. it failed to make an impression despite technorati having growing pains of its own that probably annoy many users and send them elsewhere. Google tries to apply the same methods used on their main search system to the blog search and its not really working partly because its more about people than data.

Blog search is fairly saturated already and most of the big search players have a blog search of some kind and 'independants' are still popping up daily but what about board/forum search? None of the majors do it at all!

Boards are not seen as quite so trendy as blogs and so have been mostly overlooked despite them being hugely popular and showing no signs of stagnating.. the board world is still growing fast and the only real board search engine to date is boardtracker which has many of the features that google and the rest of GYMA lack including..

Persistant search.. they all offer alerts but what use are these when they are alerting on content they just found which was created years ago? Only the specialist search engines like boardtracker offer real persistant search at the moment.

Categorized searching (helps with the problem someone mentioned above when searching for 'horn' since you can restrict search to the 'music' category or whatever you want) - again boardtracker has an effective implementation of this and a few others may also but where is Google?

Searchable rss feeds.. rss is good and google does have it on their blogsearch but what about the main search? Its very widely used these days and not having it is like having a three wheeled car.. it will still go, but corners are tricky and you'll feel a prat driving around in one. ;)

Tagging systems with tag clouds etc and other 'social search' features. Yahoo leads the way with these through various aquisitions.. boardtracker offers tagging for boards, technorati for blogs.. but where is Google? They seem to prefer complex automated systems rather than letting the wisdom and power of the masses help out with organizing the worlds data.. its their loss.. yahoo knows it, the verticals know it. You can't really replace one with the other but they work well together, its smart to integrate both, its smart to enhance one with the other.

Google is certainly still the best and fastest general search engine around but they still have some learning to do and either they should get out there and do some smart aquisitions to fill the chinks in their armour or they should start building what the people want because the times they are a changing.

Forums/Boards/BBS 2.0 already exists.. ;)

http://www.boardtracker.com

http://www.boardtracker.com

It has a little ajax sprinkled around along with a few other web 2.0 "features" and overall (and perhaps even despite that) its a pretty useful site. Its rather cool IMHWeb2.O ;)

As for those on that list I'd say bloglines is the killer app.. I couldn't get by without that these days.. so many rss feeds, so little time! The rest I could and in fact do live without.

http://birdflu.boardtracker.com/

Should be good for a bit of xmas shopping!

You can search all the geek/tech/whatever boards & forums there, limit by category if you choose, and get alerts by email(free) and jabber(pay)..

birdflu.boardtracker.com

Add boardtracker to your arsenal - it scans forums and can send you alerts by email and jabber based on your keywords and also has rss feeds of course.

boardtracker.com already does all the scanning, alerts and search etc. for forums very nicely.

http://space.boardtracker.com