Interactivity of the Web: Forums

There are many ways that the web serves as a way for people to come together and transmit information across the globe in one easy, continuous step. I have had many experiences with this in my usage of the Web. In addition to new services like Twitter which change the way we communicate on a daily, hourly, or even minutely basis, there are three particularly interesting tools which serve as ways to connect with those you might never have thought to connect with before the advent of the Web.

Forums enable endless conversation, but they are also useful for getting in touch with people for a given purpose. I have two intriguing stories from my usage of the forums at IMDB, the Internet Movie Database.


The first demonstrates a situation where connecting the entire world also serves to connect those right next to each other. I was attending an advance screening of a film and posted on the message board for that film to ask if anyone knew the runtime of the film. Another poster replied almost immediately that he was also curious because he too was attending a screening. It turns out that the poster was the friend I was bringing with me to the screening, and we simply didn't know each other's usernames.

The second shows how useful the Web can be in attaining information and attracting a variety of diverse sources. For a journalism class I was taking, I needed to interview by phone three individuals immersed in the culture of "Battlestar Galactica" fan fiction. Though I am a big fan of the show, I would hardly consider myself that obsessed or knowledgeable about where to find such people. I posted on a BSG forum on IMDB that I needed to interview people, and within 24 hours, I received three responses in my inbox and was able to conduct 30-minute phone interviews with each of the respondents. This resource was incredibly helpful and ultimately provided me with far better results than I might have found contacting people I knew personally.

Before we get to the next tool, let's pause for a quick web-related question.What does HTML stand for?

a) Hard To Make Learn
b) How to Move Language
c) Hyper Text Markup Language
d) Hyper Technical Moving Language