I've got a bit more testing to do, but the discussion forum feature should be landing soon. Weblogs are more or less one way communication (though some folks have quite a bit of communication through the comments). Forums or Rooms are designed to foster two-way communication over one-way ranting. You can call it whatever you like. I chose rooms because I'm already using that metaphor in the chat mechanism (which incidentally was re-architected a few days ago).

A room is nothing more than a message filter, just like categories. In fact, most everything on a modern website reduces to nothing more than a message filter. Hmmm.

In this case, the only difference from a weblog is that multiple people can write entries in a forum or room. If you had multiple authors capability on a weblog, I suppose you could call it a forum. Hmmm. I'm getting some ideas. People like me spend a lot of time implementing weblogs, forums, comments, email, etc. Just like I did with email many years ago, I've come to realize that this whole issue boils down to a (single) categorization function. They're all messages.  All of the different features of modern systems can be reduced to finding different ways of choosing which messages to look at. Most of the time, this is hard-wired into the website design. Folders, rooms,  forums, blogs - they're merely hardwired collections of messages. Why should they be hard-wired? Why couldn't one have a logical view of a website? Virtual dynamic document collections. Hmmm. Deja vu. I've done this all before.

Why would anybody care?, you might ask. Well imagine this. Right now you can find this particular message filed in various ways. Messages by Mike, messages in the category 'software', messages written in March, 2006, etc. All of these categorizations are performed on the website. What if this categorization was under your control? You might choose to categorize it differently. Messages about messages, for instance. Messages written by Mike on a Thursday. Messages that weren't addressed to a particular person. Messages that contain both the words 'kinky' and 'sex'.  And what if the entire website was your collections of messages instead of my collections of messages? Now do you see what I mean? The entire concept is highly addicting.