I think there are many reasons why it hasn't had the take-up we might 
expect.

Firstly it takes a confident person to be so upfront about their 
ideas/thoughts/projects. Not everyone has that confidence and I'm sure 
we've all witnessed posts where people have been flamed for saying 
something controversial. This is especially difficult within teams as 
the most vocal tend to blog the most.

I think many people still don't see the point. It can take less than 
five minutes to write a blog post but you have to have a topic in mind, 
consider how you may come across and what you want to say.

I also don't think there aren't enough of us doing it for people to see 
the real value - yet! If more of us used blogs then we'd be able to gain 
a real picture of the work going on across all Universites (which would 
make the idea I pitched at IWMW really useful - and easy!).

I think perhaps we need to give people more incentives to blog rather 
than just asking them why they don't. If other Universites can see real 
value then I'm sure we'd see greater takeup. So from a University of 
Bath perspective you can learn:

- Details on our Web Sessions which have included presentations (and 
videos) on such things as 'Managing your professional identity' and 'RSS 
and Atom feeds in the real world). Both of these are available for 
anyone to re-use so we're effectively giving away our work for free!

- Our thoughts and reflections on conferences and events. You don't have 
to be there - you can read our notes to see if it's of interest - any 
maybe attend the next year.

- Our projects - Find our what we're working on and any new technologies 
we're playing around with.

http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/webservices

Blogs are very useful. If we know more about the activities of others we 
can learn a great deal and hopefully prevent re-inventions of the wheel, 
over and over and over again...

Michael Nolan wrote:
> At the risk of opening myself up to (probably deserved) flaming and accusations of blatant self promotion, I've posted to the Edge Hill Web Services blog questioning why so few other university web teams have a blog:
>
> http://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/webservices/2008/07/28/blogging-web-teams/
>
> Comments and feedback welcome!
>
> Mike
>
>
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-- 
Alison Wildish
Head of Web Services
University of Bath
01225 385381

http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/webservices/