Recently Martin Weller and Tony Hirst ran a workshop in Digilab on Academic blogging, explaining how they both feel that writing and reading blogs has helped them in their work.

Martin wrote about the workshop on his own blog, so you can see his thoughts on the value of academic blogging, and his slideshow, here.

I found it very interesting that Tony, Martin and John Naughton (who was also at the workshop), all had different reasons for blogging, and different views about their intended audience. Tony blogs for himself, as a way to keep track of interesting thoughts or work that he might want to revisit later. Sometimes his thought process his helped along by comments from those who read his blog, but he doesn't always write with his readers in mind. John sees blogging as an extension of his work as a journalist, so he does have think about his audience when he's writing, and Martin tries to stick to the subject of edcuational technology, so his audience are his fellow practitioners.

Tony and Martin recommend that new bloggers try to write 20 or so posts in their first month, to "find their voice" and get accustomed to the process before they start publicising their blogs. After that, it's up to you how often you write new posts, although obviously if you make them too infrequent your readers may lose interest.