Using blogs, tags and trackbacks to replace forums

The following is a quick idea I had. It isn’t fully though out and may not actually be that useful. But read it anyway - you should be intrigued by now.

I used to run an online game called Galaxia. And it had some forums. And the game changed and it moved and my forum software changed and all sorts of things happened to make me lose the forums. It occurred to me that blogs could be used to essentially distribute the forums.

If some user had a problem with the game they could write a blog entry about it and tag it appropriately (“Galaxia-Support” for instance). Somewhere on the Galaxia site would be a list of such posts (using Technorati for instance http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/galaxia-support). People could then reply as neccessary (or even trackback from their own blog).

All that would be needed would be a list of the tags the site wished to use (which should be complicated enough to avoid collecting the wrong posts but simple enough to remember) and an area for non-bloggers to post entries.

As I said I’m not sure how useful the idea is but the whole distributed content things feels like a good idea.