Blogs
Blogs have seemingly invaded the internet; even your brother’s wife’s grandmas cousin has a blog that she shares her family famous recipes on. But what is a blog really? A blog is defined in its strictest form as an online journal, think of it just like the diary or journal you hide under your bed.
Once you have a blog you add entries to it, entries are just like pages in your journal. Every time you want to add something to your journal you simply write on the next page, you don’t go buy a new journal every time you want to write something new down. It is the same idea with blogs; you create one blog and then when you want to write more, you simply add entries instead of creating a new blog.

Now don’t misunderstand me, your site can certainly have more than one blog. However, if you are adding multiple blogs they should be about broad reaching, dissimilar topics. For example you could have a blog for the CEO to post his thoughts in, a blog to discuss new products, a blog to post support related issues and so on. If the topics are vastly different, then feel free to add another blog. The idea is to make it easy for your readers to find what they are looking for and the blogs should be intuitive enough to make this easy.

The key thing about blogs is that YOU have to put the content in for people to read. After you post an entry, your readers can comment on it but this is not a form of communication where your readers can add their own entries. The idea here is for you to share information with your readers and then allow them to comment with their thoughts on your entry.

Forums
Forums are the highest form of interactive communication that the OneNet system offers. Forums are a place where your users can go and post their own topics up for discussion. Unlike blogs, forums can allow users to post their own topics and garner discussion without any interaction needed from you to get the ball rolling.

The way it works is you setup the overall forum and then create categories. The categories cover the topics that you want people to converse about. This is by no means restrictive, people can post wherever they want but by organizing sub forums in a way that makes topical sense, your users will be able to easier find the info that interests them and will promote more communication. Additionally, you have the ability to moderate forums to ensure that content is not

Forums are similar to having a roundtable discussion. Someone presents an idea or topic and everyone else has the opportunity to comment with their thoughts on the subject. Forums are a great way to promote communication and interaction between users. They can also be a great way to build a community of users that constantly visit your site. By having good forums, people will be in the habit of visiting your site and as a byproduct, increasing your traffic and visibility.

So what should I use?
At the end of the day it all comes down to this one question. If you are looking to share information with your users and get the occasional feedback from them then blogs is probably your ideal solution. If you would like to interact with your users in a more discussion oriented environment and enable them to interact with each other then forums is the better solution.