Welcome to the third Learning 2.0 @ SEMLS class. I created this blog during our first Learning 2.0 class in the Winter of 2008 to share my experiences teaching an online class.  However, as I have told many of my previous class participants, I am a horrible blogger and my posting was infrequent, even as I was expecting all of the participants to post on a weekly basis.

For this class, I decided to try something new and discuss my personal experience with each of the technologies we are covering during the week. I’m hoping this will keep me blogging throughout the course of this class.

I have been writing the SEMLS Tech Watch blog for about four years now. I originally used Blogger for the Tech Watch blog, but I have since moved it over to Movable Type, which is the blogging software installed on our Web server.

I am a sporadic blogger. I can go two months without adding a single post, and then I can add five in one week. This is not an example anyone should follow. This week, we cover the technology behind setting up a blog, but the difficult part is making sure it remains relevant and up to date. And that’s what your blog is all about: content. You need to be committed to regularly posting to your blog.

How frequently should you post? It really depends on the nature of the blog. Some blogs require daily posting. Others can get by with monthly posting. But I think it’s important that your users know if it is something that’s only updated monthly.

Another blogger who is a much more frequent poster, Brian Herzog from the Swiss Army Librarian, once told me that when he started his blog, he just forced himself to set aside time every week so that he would be posting on a weekly basis. If you look at his blog now, you’ll see he usually posts more often than that, but I think it’s a good policy to start that way to get yourself in the habit of posting.

And, one day, I’ll try to do that with my Tech Watch blog!

I do hope you all enjoy the class over the next seven weeks. It’s one of my favorite classes to teach, and I look forward to seeing how everyone progresses through the Web 2.0 universe.