As you all know, I have a dev blog over on
http://mobfactory.blogspot.com. Is it a valid thing to do to create a board for similar purposes here? Eg prevent topic creation except by admins/me, while everyone else can comment on it? That's pretty much all blogspot does.
I don't think so. I think that the two serve entirely different purposes.
Blogs, while usually allowing some level of feedback in the form of comments, are typically meant more as a one-way publishing medium.
Forums are highly interactive and encourage participation largely because it's so free-form that there's likely always something to pique a viewer's interest enough to jump in and participate.
Practically speaking, I've found the forum to be a great traffic driver because the volume and variety of topics and posts lead to the site being discovered under keywords you would never think to target from a pure SEO perspective.
