Blog education or pilots

Gabriela Avram at Coniecto wrote about Not blogging...because of too much blogging!.  Turns out she is putting together a course on blogging through her university and some EU money.  Someone at BlogWalk Chicago mentioned that they are considering setting up a blogging workshop aimed at professionals.  And one of the BlogWalk Chicago discussions resulted in a Blog Pilot Template.

Gabriela highlighted something else that also came up in some of our discussions this weekend:

Blogging regularly - we had this talk at BlogWalk2 - blogging is fun, but if somebody would force you to blog every morning, will it still be fun? Or it will be perceived as a burden? In the beginning, I told them nice words like "you don't have to blog if you don't feel like!", "I'm not going to force you to blog", "I am not going to be your teacher, but your coach running side by side and encouraging you, so you can find your own rhythm..." etc. Well, I had to abandon my good intentions and to set clear deadlines, otherwise some of them would have never found the courage to start.

The people who I read regularly are passionate about what they are doing and what they are saying.  They don't mind the time and energy required to blog.  To ask people who aren't passionate to operate this way; or to "require" those who are passionate to write as part of their job significantly changes the dynamic on how blogs have worked.  This assumes the definition of a "blog" includes this concept of translating personal ideas and meaning into the written word on your blog.  Other styles of blog may not suffer so much from this problem. 

The other important aspect of the blog is the readers.  Upon starting, one must assume an audience.  In this case, the audience is probably the other students in the class.  But as one develops their audience and their own skills, the topic and style of their blog will likely change and grow.  Some of the relevant questions that appeared at BlogWalk Chicago included, "Is it a blog if you have no readers?"  and "Can you blog without the technology?"