An Internet forum is a facility on the World Wide Web for holding discussions, or the web application software used to provide the facility. Web-based forums, which date from around 1995, perform a similar function as the dial-up bulletin boards and Internet newsgroups that were numerous in the 1980s and 1990s. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of different topics .

Internet forums are also commonly referred to as web forums, message boards, discussion boards, discussion forums, discussion groups, bulletin boards (but see also dial-up bulletin boards), fora (the proper Latin plural) or simply forums.

Culture

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Internet forums are prevalent in several developed countries. In terms of countable posts, Japan is far in the lead with over two million posts per day on their largest forum, 2channel. The United States does not have any one large forum, but instead several hundred thousand smaller forums, the largest of which are GameFAQs, Gaia Online, and IGN. Other countries such as China, the Netherlands, and France are also home to hundreds of independent forums. Some countries such as Finland and Sweden do not have many prevalent forums despite having open and easily available Internet access. As of yet no study has been done on the prevalence of forums in countries around the world. It is also dubious as to whether any country has its own fora, as - especially in the English language - contributors to a forum often come from outside the country in which the forum is hosted. There is often not a 1-1 relationship between languages and countries: for example, English language fora are contributed to by people all over the world, whilst Japanese language fora are likely to be contributed to only by Japanese people, but Japanese people also contribute to English language fora, so there is no 1-1 relationship between Japanese language fora and Japanese people contributing to fora.

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All about Microsoft

Microsoft extends XP downgrade rights date by six months
Mary Jo Foley Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:07:09 -0000
Microsoft is sending some very confusing signals about Windows Vista -- the latest of which it issued via a statement on October 3.
Zune services on Win Mobile = ‘Pink’
Mary Jo Foley Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:26:14 -0000
CEO Steve Ballmer reiterated this week that Microsoft has decided against building its own Zune phone. (Chairman Bill Gates said the same thing back in January 2008, for those keeping score at home.) Ballmer also noted this week that Microsoft is looking to bring Zune software/services to Windows Mobile. This "news," too, isn't really new.
Live Labs kills Deepfish; suspends Volta downloads
Mary Jo Foley Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:32:15 -0000
Microsoft has quickly and quietly killed off one of its touted Live Labs projects, as my ZDNet blogging colleague Matthew Miller recently blogged. And another of the Microsoft incubator's projects -- the Volta tookit -- is missing in action.
A new mystery: What’s Microsoft got up its Office Live sleeve?
Mary Jo Foley Wed, 01 Oct 2008 19:22:06 -0000
It sounds like Microsoft has yet another Professional Developers Conference (PDC) announcement percolating -- beyond the Windows 7, Oslo, cloud OS (Red Dog/Zurich) and Mesh Platform stuff about which the company already has been dropping hints.
Amazon launches pre-emptive strike against Microsoft’s planned cloud platform
Mary Jo Foley Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:28:16 -0000
Microsoft is gearing up to go big with its plans for its own version of its hosted development platform later this month. But Amazon.com isn't sitting idly by, waiting for Microsoft to rain on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Microsoft readies new ‘Dublin’ distributed app server
Mary Jo Foley Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:22:20 -0000
In conjunction with the rollout of its next-generation .Net Framework 4.0 release, Microsoft is readying a new distributed application server, code-named "Dublin."

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