The amount of stuff Ning gets right is impressive, but they’re still blinded by tradition — and few things demonstrate this more than their forum/blog division.

Want to know the question my members on my local Ning site ask me most often?

“Should I do this as a forum or a blog?”

And all I’m able to do is throw up my hands in frustration. By maintaining weird divisions between blogs (which are posted text + discussion) and forums (which are posted text + discussion) the creators of Ning have created a dilemma where there should be none.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just duplication. But the hidden ways in which these are different require just too much understanding of how Ning works:

1. Forums give you 15 minutes to edit your comment before it is locked (a fact which initially led me to use them for everything), blog comments are locked against changes immediately.
2. Blogs ping services like Technorati, forums don’t. This is particularly annoying in running a public information site — it means the time sensitive comment in the educational funding forum is unlikely to get indexed when it matters, where as the blog post about one’s new cat goes out immediately.
3. Groups can only do forums, so if you want your thing categorized under a group name, a blog post is out.
4. Comments on blogs are called comments, on forums they are called “replies”.
5. Forum comments can be nested, blog comments can’t.
6. On the front page, forums show who the last reply was by to the forum — a great tool to get you to realize there’s more to respond to than the original post. Blogs just tell you the number of comments.
7. Blogs on the front page say the exact time they were posted — forums just tell you the day.
8. Clicking on a member name on the forum blurb on the front page lists all posts and comments a person has made. Clicking on a member name on the blog post blurb takes you to their profile page.

This is barely scratching the surface. As a person with quite a background in blogging and forums it’s confusing to me — so no wonder people with less background are tearing their hair out about it.

I understand the idea that Ning must be working with — that blogs are somehow about authors, and forums are about commenters.

But IMHO, that’s a 2006 understanding of blogging. The point is, most of the time at the point you post in a community you don’t know whether the value will end up being about the post or the comments.

That “in a community” bit is crucial. Look at the stuff that has grown up around Daily Kos, AutoblogGreen, and other community sites. Sometimes it’s a conversation, and sometimes it’s people dutifully responding to the meat of a post. But you really don’t know which it is until it all shakes out.

So why not unify these two things, instead of maintaining this false and confusing seperation? Make it all blogging, and incorporate some of these differences into admin settings?

Feel free to respond to the post in the comments, or just discuss it among yourselves. Whichever.

So it’s weird moving from managing a high-profile political community to managing a local information site. One minute you’re spinning your way into the front page of the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, and the next you’re talking about salamander crossings.

But there is a point here, trust me.

Salamander migrations occur here in New Hampshire every year, and a local organization helps get them across the road on the big nights they move. There are known migration paths, and hundreds of volunteers sign up to assist gathering them up and taking them across the road.

When you start digging into this locally, you find almost everybody has heard of this.

Here’s the point — there’s varying degrees of success, mostly depending on the weather. The right rainy weather forces a big migration that can be managed– less than that, a trickle. How it works out is news.

One of the crossing coordinators posted a beautiful comment on Citizen Keene last night, right after the attempt to help, and I think it’s a great example of what local information can be: legitimate up-to-the-minute news, but passionate and personal at the same time.

I’m really curious to hear how the salamander crossing went tonight at all of our sites….at my site on Route 63 in Spofford, the rain mysteriously ceased from 8 until almost midnight — prime crossing time — so we had a frustratingly slow night. A big disappointment, since the weather forecast fooled me into thinking we’d have a Big Night on our hands. Still, the seven of us crossed 19 spotties, 20 peepers, 8 wood frogs, and 2 red efts. On the way home, I decided to take it real slow, stopping to cross every living amphibian that wandered across my path down Route 63 and over on 119, on my way back to my farmhouse apartment in Ashuelot. What would have been a twenty-minute drive turned into nearly two hours; I moved 10 more spotties, 6 additional wood frogs, 7 peepers, and one wayward toad, several only moments before a vehicle would likely have struck them. Several folks stopped to see if I needed help after seeing my hazards flashing, which was awfully nice: when I explained what I was doing to a Hinsdale police officer on 63, he told me that his wife crosses spotted salamanders too (!)

The carnage, of course, was sobering; nothing will make you HATE automobiles like hearing the “pop” of a wood frog being crushed under a tire, or seeing a spotted salamander with its crushed back cemented to the pavement.

I killed a woodfrog on my drive home, too. It leaped in front of my tire before I could swerve to avoid it; when I got out of the car to see if it had survived the encounter, I almost burst into tears. Then I heard the quacking of chorusing woodfrogs nearby, and discovered a vernal pool almost immediately adjacent to the road. I wandered down to the pool’s edge with my flashlight, and witnessed the merriment in full force: wood frogs EVERYWHERE, a riot of quacking and swimming, a few couples already in amplexus, and a spottie (the odd one out!) swimming around too. SO MUCH LIFE! SO riotously beautiful….and a small comfort, I suppose, that the wood frog I had hit was heading away from the party, eggs already laid perhaps?

There’s a lot different between running Blue Hampshire and Citizen Keene, but one thing remains the same: the key is to get people to participate — and to discuss things that might otherwise have gone unrecorded. In the weeks to come I’ll probably be droning on about why Ning is better than Soapblox, WPMU, phpBB and Zope for running a local information site — but the key here is always participation and quality of discourse — and if you’re dithering on your own local information site because you can’t decide on platform — well, don’t. Just get going with it. Life’s just too short for us to miss these stories.