Blogs & Forums

[johnegood]

I have a parents forum (I have a kids education site) which gets reasonable traffic and allows parents to share info on how they use us. I have a few parents that moderate it and do a great job. I also have some parents who do writing for me and I'm thinking of having them create blogs in which they discuss their children's experiences on my service so that other parents can learn from their experiences.

I'm wondering. Is there any way to have a set of blogs in which the posts get discussed not in the comments but inside the forum? Would this produce a tighter community? Most site seem to have forums and blogs (with comments) as two entirely separate communities.....

I've tried something like this with my newsletter in which I invite people to respond and the link takes them right to a thread on the forum which starts with the same article. That works pretty well. Is this original or something that other people do routinely.